February podcast

February's Philosophy Monthly is now out. In this programme, I’m reporting on the debate surrounding the growth of the well-being agenda, and talking to the winner of the Lakatos Prize for the philosophy of Science, Samir Okasha, about evolution.

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How to Live

"Human beings are great believers in lies after death. It starts with undertakers, who prepare bodies to look like sleeping angels rather than rotting, pallid corpses. It ends with biographers, whose own noble lie is to turn the reality of life as one darn thing after another into a fantasy of a coherent narrative with a meaning."

Review of Sara Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, publihsed in last weekend's FT (30/31 January)

Sunday - BBC Radio Four

I was on this morning's programme telling the truth about lying ... perhaps. You can listen again here for one week: it's the first item in the programme.

Beyond the blame game

"One of humankind's most distinctive and potent capacities is its ability to ask why. But one of its most frequently observed weaknesses is to give the wrong kind of answer. Fortunately, the most egregious of these have something in common, which more and more people are recognising..."

New post at Guardian Comment is Free

Where happiness lies

"The choice is not between being positive or negative. The issue is whether we start with the facts or with our attitudes. What positive psychology gets right is that when we confront reality, we always have some control over how we then respond to it, and that a lot of misery is avoidable if we try to make the best rather than the worst of things. In practice, however, this sensible advice often degenerates into an excessive optimism, in which reality is whatever we think it to be. But you can’t make the best of a bad situation if you pretend it’s really just a good one in disguise."

Review of four happiness-related books in this weekend's FT