The World Is Still Open

I want more people to find out how much they could enjoy philosophy.

You can spend a few minutes with an obscure book and find yourself thinking about it for weeks. Someone who died three hundred years ago gets under your skin. You argue with them in your head while you’re making a brew. Then, halfway through trying to explain to someone why they’re wrong, you realise you’re not quite sure any more.

I love that. I love how a subject can become interesting once somebody gives you a way into it. A question you’d barely noticed turns out to have been winding people up for centuries, and you begin to understand why.

This is what I want to spend my time doing. I want to read and write, and teach people who are curious enough to follow a question down a rabbit hole without knowing where it will take them.

I spent fifteen years in academia, but left in 2021 because I lost faith in how universities were treating education. I’ve also spent much of my working life in sport, where performance matters a great deal. I understand the appeal of getting better at stuff. What bothers me is how easily that becomes the justification we demand of every interest.

We’re perfectly happy with someone picking up painting or golf because they love it. They can spend years getting better without anyone asking how it’ll boost their career. I think being into philosophy deserves the same freedom. Maybe you want to get what Nietzsche was on about, or understand what the hell Heidegger meant. That’s reason enough.

When we justify education only through its usefulness, we usually have a specific goal in mind. We want to get better at something or reach a target we’ve already set. That’s a narrow account of what learning can do.

What happens when you come across something that changes what you want?

You couldn’t have put it on a to-do list beforehand. You had to encounter it to realise it mattered to you. Maybe a book shows you a possibility you hadn’t imagined, or a conversation sparks an interest that becomes a huge part of your life. Suddenly, you care about something that was nowhere near your radar before.

That feels to me like one of the best reasons to keep learning. I don’t know everything that might interest me yet. I want to keep some space for those surprises.

Philosophy is good at shaking up the words we’re used to using, like “success” and “progress.” We use them to organise our lives, but rarely stop to think about what we mean.

If a new technology cuts your work time in half, you can measure the gain in speed. Whether that amounts to progress takes more thought. We have to ask why we were doing the work in the first place and what we’ll do with the time we’ve gained. Those questions involve judgements about what makes life worthwhile. Having more power to get things done gives us more to decide.

AI gives us plenty to work with here. You can ask a machine to explain a philosophical idea and keep asking follow-up questions. That opens up ways into a subject. It also makes it worth noticing the difference between finding an explanation convincing and understanding why we ought to agree with it.

My interest in philosophy goes well beyond keeping up with the latest technology, though. Even if all the machines vanished tomorrow, I’d still want it in my life. There’s too much that’s weird and fascinating about being here, in the world, as a human.

Think about how we can share a room and disagree about what happened in it. Or how we still feel like ourselves as so much around and inside us changes. Everyday life is full of things like that. Philosophers can help us see the depth in experiences we take for granted.

Understanding an idea can change how you see a place you already know. You notice things on a walk that you’d have passed without a thought. Your attention has more to work with. The world can start to feel more alive, and so can you.

That’s part of the adventure I want to share. Philosophy can be infuriating. Some of the effort is necessary. I love helping someone work through a concept. It takes care, but I’m good at it. There’s something satisfying about understanding an idea you thought was beyond you, and then feeling able to question it.

The bigger idea behind my work is something I’ve been calling syntropology: a philosophy of living participation in an unfinished world.

The world we inherit shapes what we can do, often in ways we haven’t chosen. But our participation also matters. What we do can open possibilities for other people, or close them down. That makes the conditions we create worth thinking about. Does our teaching encourage people to pursue questions of their own? Do people have a meaningful say in the future of something they’re part of?

I’d like more of us to feel that we have a hand in making that future.

Philosophy has a part to play here because our assumptions shape what we can imagine. If we accept the way things are as inevitable, we’ll have little reason to consider alternatives. Seeing how differently people have understood the world can loosen that assumption. It gives the imagination something to work with and asks us to think carefully about what we propose.

This is where my writing and teaching belong. I want to help people live more intellectually adventurous lives, where curiosity gets some proper time and there are people around who enjoy following a question past the first plausible answer.

I want some romance in it too. The anticipation of a gathering you’re looking forward to. The pleasure of a book as an object, and of being somewhere that gives the conversation a character of its own. There’s room for beauty in how we bring people into contact with ideas.

Writing The Syntropist gave me a way to explore these ideas through fiction. Painting philosophers is another expression of my interest in them. I want space to keep experimenting, including with things I haven’t thought of yet. Philosophy can meet people in all sorts of ways.

In my teaching, that openness matters. If we work together, I’ll help you find a way into the subject and make sense of what we explore. You can bring questions you’ve had for years, or arrive with an interest you haven’t quite found words for. We’ll take it seriously and see where it leads.

I want someone to come across this work and discover an interest they couldn’t have planned for. To pick up a book they would have walked past, or find people they want to keep thinking with. Then for that interest to become something of their own, taking directions I couldn’t have prescribed.

I want to spend my life helping that happen. I want to see what becomes possible when more people have that opportunity.

If you’d like to explore philosophy with me, get in touch.