What do you do with a PhD in philosophy if you’re not going to stay in academia? This was the conundrum that faced Julian Baggini after finishing his PhD at University College London in 1997. Nearly twenty-five years later, his founding (and hand-off) of a magazine, twenty books, numerous press articles, and occasional talks add up to a career as a freelance philosopher. None of it was a long-term plan.
In many of his articles, Baggini writes about current issues, such as the public reaction to Greta Thunberg, COVID-19 denialism, the UK government’s excuses for the country’s shocking death rate, and obesity, where he points out that ending food poverty would be a better government response. In his books, such as 2018’s How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy, he writes more directly about his subject, making it accessible and entertaining.
He began by setting up The Philosophers’ Magazine, which he cofounded with Jeremy Stangroom. Current editor James Garvey took over from Baggini in 2010.
“I thought it should exist, so I gave it a go,” he says. This was how we met: an early editorial decision was to request a column on skepticism, apparently as a sort of leavening amid the magazine’s largely academic contributions. In return, I booked him to write on philosophy for The Skeptic.
At the time, he says, “There was hardly any philosophy being done in the public square.” Although the magazine did become a platform from which to launch his career, that wasn’t the point: “It was genuinely that I thought it would be great to do it … and I needed something to stay involved with philosophy, and I wasn’t sold on academic life. So, what could I do? There was nothing for me to slot into.” Unknown to him at the time, in fact Philosophy Now (whose U.S. staff includes former Free Inquiry editor Tim Madigan) had started up a few years earlier, but its focus was rather different. “It’s strange to think, when I look back, how little of what we now call ‘popular philosophy’ was around.”
Partly, the problem was academics then got little credit for interacting with the public. Baggini cites as an example Nigel Warburton, whose academic standing did not benefit from the widespread use of his Philosophy: The Basics in schools and universities. “That kind of work wasn’t respected.” The shift since then has been substantial: “Now, doing work for an audience beyond your peers is encouraged and rewarded as it wasn’t before. I think we played a small part in helping that shift and also in persuading people that it could be done.”
Baggini and Stangroom, a fellow philosophy writer and web designer, met through teaching in London’s sixth-form colleges. “He was heavily into the internet when no one knew what it was.” Stangroom created the website and helped source images; Baggini did the editing and layout in PageMaker, an early desktop publishing program, which he’d learned while doing his PhD. “It was amazing that anyone with a computer who could pay for a print run could produce a magazine.” Less than a decade earlier, that equipment was financially out of reach for The Skeptic; a decade later, Beggini’s magazine might have been a blog.
We are speaking at a time when many university departments are under threat of closure, partly for financial reasons, partly for “value” reasons that Baggini questions in a 2018 Guardian article, arguing against pure utilitarianism without claiming philosophy deserved special consideration. Although, he says, “There’s a kind of hubris in philosophy about being the ‘queen of the sciences’—the uber-discipline and everything else came from it.”
Overall, “I have mixed feelings about philosophy,” he says. “I do feel it has a value and a worth, but I don’t know how much that’s because enough people like me are drawn to ask certain questions and explore them. Whether it’s doing the rest of humanity any good …” Even so, “I do think philosophy is unavoidable. Either you have people doing it seriously and hopefully well, or you find people doing it badly.” As an example, he points to the question of free will, the subject of his 2015 book Freedom Regained. Absent philosophers, it might be dismissed with the recognition that consciousness and mental lives are based in operations of the physical brain or the presumption that free will can’t exist in a universe governed by laws of cause and effect. “If you’re serious,” he says, “why wouldn’t you look at the people who’ve thought long and hard and done the reading?”
Instead, many people have rather “sloppy” ideas about what philosophy is and dismiss it, even though “No one who hadn’t read an anthropology book would dismiss it.” Instead, many take the “I’m a bit of a philosopher myself, actually” approach. Submissions to the magazine showed that many people become attached to theories they develop themselves in isolation. “A lot of them are smart people who didn’t have much education, and they’ve been left to try to work it out for themselves. I have some sympathy; the impulse is admirable.”
At the moment, the question that interests Baggini most is “the whole possibility of self-knowledge. What does it mean to know yourself? Can you really know yourself? Why don’t we have more control and self-awareness? It takes some philosophizing to even see the problem. Other people sometimes know us better than we do ourselves, yet we have privileged access. It’s really fascinating and really difficult.”