Peter: Were it only so

Anyone who has browsed it knows that The New York Times takes seriously its motto of more than 100 years: “All the news that’s fit to print.” The New York Times prints news covering politics and economics, culture and cooking, arts and health, fashion and obituaries, and a lot more in between. Does it need another column? Thinking of what I might cover in a column, I realised that all of my topics have already been done. Words? John McWhorter currently writes a column that typically focuses on words and language, recently an essay on the pronoun they. There is an entire section on food; another column about that isn’t needed. But since it retired the long-running column “The Stone”, there has been no column specifically addressing philosophy. The column I would enjoy writing for The New York Times would be on philosophy, which fits my long term interests and resulting knowledge, and whose ideas and approach I suspect many readers would find at least clarify the issues in a range of complex questions that concern individuals and society. 

One of my earliest memories is a silly thing I said to my mother when asked what sandwiches I wanted for school lunch: “Yesterday.” When she told me not to be silly, I came back with an equally impossible answer. From the visual image of our old house accompanying that memory, I must have been six or seven at the time, although my memory of more than half a century ago might not be reliable. I suspect like many children, I asked questions and wondered why impossible things were impossible. Those early philosophical leanings went to sleep during my primary school years in a very small Catholic convent school run by nuns, where I was a fairly ordinary, somewhat shy, student who discovered that reading was a fun way to escape people and explore strange realities in encyclopaedias and weirder unrealities in fiction. 

Those interests were initially met in high school by science and mathematics. Mathematics soon won out over every other subject. It’s worlds of numbers, from natural to imaginary and complex, were more exotic than anything in the real world, and then there were all the other branches of mathematics to intoxicate an impressionable teenage mind. Physics came second, but mainly theoretical physics. Actual experiments did not excite me as much as working out what must logically follow from a set of principles with the help, of course, of mathematics. Towards the end of my high school years, my physics and mathematics teacher, a Marist Brother at my Catholic high school, might have been concerned that my passion for mathematics and science would lead me away from my Catholic faith, so he introduced me to philosophy. He suggested good, proper Christian thinkers, but that backfired badly. I read his suggested Thomas Aquinas and Søren Kierkegaard, but the town library had a lot more to offer, and that began my addiction to philosophy. It quickly proved fatal to religious belief. 

My university career began as planned with a science degree majoring in mathematics, but after a year, I switched to arts, which let me continue with mathematics but drop the science for languages and philosophy, which became my major, and in which I’ve never lost interest. 

Philosophy does not do experiments, but it does use the results of science along with every other resource that involves thinking, acting or other human experience: not only science, but politics, linguistics, literature, daily life, and everything else are tools that philosophers regularly use in their arguments. I’ve never tired of exploring it. 

My column in The New York Times would apply philosophy’s set of reasoning tools to topical issues. An obvious issue in the US at the moment is the renewed controversy around abortion. Most of the arguments from those opposing abortion seem seriously flawed. Most recently in the news Texas’s so called “Heartbeat bill” argues that abortion should be legally banned after a heartbeat is detected in a foetus. But if the argument that there is something special about having a heartbeat is taken seriously, it logically applies also to every animal we kill to eat, all of which have heartbeats when we kill them to make tasty bacon, steak or chicken nuggets. I’m not sure whether the proponents of Texas’s law are unable to reason or are dishonest, but they need some lessons in basic philosophical reasoning. 

A related issue I could explore in my column is what makes just law, what are the obligations and the limits of governments when making law that a society must follow. I’m looking forward to the upcoming US Supreme Court opinion on the Mississippi case about abortion it has agreed to hear this session. Will it manage to write an opinion that both follows justice and also comports with the US Constitution? America awaits the outcome. 

Another related issue is the meanings of words. That tradition was begun by Plato, several of whose dialogues are effectively discussions about what knowledge, justice, and so on really mean. In the abortion arguments, but also relevant to when we may justly kill other animals, or humans who want to die, is the meaning of words like person, where some philosophical analysis could helpfully clarify the issues. I could easily write a thousand words on why we need to distinguish the set of persons from the set of human beings, an area where common dictionary definitions reflect the traditional prejudices of native English speakers. 

The New York Times will not offer me a column; if it did, I would take the opportunity to share my lifelong passion for the broad subject matter of philosophy and its methods, showing how, although rarely giving definitive answers to some of the most fundamental questions we ask ourselves, philosophy does help to clarify the issues from competing sides. While my dream remains a dream, I can continue to indulge my passion for reading, writing and arguing philosophy. 

words = 995 (after several revisions) 

You can also see my planning.