Philosopher Richard Swinburne of Oxford University
Veery: Before you got into philosophy, what was on your mind as philosophy is on your mind today? Richard Swinburne: Well, I am basically and always have been a basically religious person, and I was at one stage going to be a priest, but I came to feel that I would be of more use to the Church as a philosopher than as a priest, and so that diverted my religious energy into philosophy.
Veery: What is the most rewarding aspect of philosophy? Richard Swinburne: I think that philosophy aims at very general truths about the universe, and finding those out, or finding out what are quite likely to be the general truths, is enormously rewarding; truth matters; deep truth matters a lot; philosophers are lucky to spend their time in trying to discover it.
Veery: What disappoints you today about the present philosophical world? Richard Swinburne: My general views are on the whole minority views and so, although I’m very much part of the tradition in arguing the way the tradition does, the big, big conclusions I come to are minority positions. And clearly, since I think those are true positions, I am disappointed that not everybody believes them, but yes that is how it is: I believe there is a God; I believe arguments make that probable; most philosophers don’t believe there’s a God; they don’t believe arguments make it probable; they’re wrong. I believe that human beings consist of two parts, body and soul, and that arguments show that; almost all philosophers think that isn’t the case, and that arguments show their positions. So inevitably in so far as I am in a minority I regret that. But philosophers are an open-minded crowd. One finds very often they’re prepared to listen, so I go on talking.
Veery: What do you look for in a piece of philosophy? Veery: What does it have to have for you to be impressed by it? Richard Swinburne: Ideally, it has to have clear rigorous argument working up to important and big and significant conclusions, or to plausible conclusions, at least by a route original and rigorous, and where even if you feel that there are arguments against, which mean in the end that the conclusions are not true, still it can be very impressive. I stress the rigor of argument starting from fairly evident premises.
I’m very much in the modern Anglo-American tradition of philosophy which I believe is basically the tradition of philosophy since Plato, in the sense that it starts from evident premises, and it works by clear rigorous arguments up to definite conclusions, and it’s scientifically orientated in the sense that it wants to take on board the latest discoveries of the sciences. For example, with regard to the old problem of the relation of the mind to the body, which has been around since Plato, I would expect philosophy to take account of the latest discoveries in neurophysiology, not of course the neurophysiologists’s philosophical glossies on their results, but their detailed results. The philosopher should start from evident facts that we know, say, that we have bodies and that we are conscious and that sort of thing, add the latest scientific discoveries and then use arguments which are either deductively valid or inductively cogent working up to some general conclusion, such as there is nothing but matter, or alternatively, that there are two parts to us, body and soul, and here would be an important element of the general metaphysic, of the general account of the world, which it is I think the task of philosophy to produce.
You notice I emphasized the “Anglo-American” tradition of philosophy. It’s a sad fact that in the past two hundred years there have developed two traditions of philosophy in the Western world, the Continental tradition and the Anglo-American tradition. The Continental tradition has been more a tradition of literature than of philosophy, that, as to my mind, philosophy has traditionally been conceived, and that’s not to denigrate it; literature has immense value and gives immense insight, but it’s not, I think, philosophy in the traditional mold, and I’d include both, for example, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in the Continental tradition. Their writings are immensely significant and interesting, but they’re not philosophy in the sense of the tradition of what’s been called philosophy in the Western world since Plato, which is much more a tradition of argument for a definite conclusion. You don’t get very much argument in Nietzsche, you get a stance. Veery: You’re taking Hume, against Kierkegaard, as a pure philosopher. Where would you put Kant with that? Richard Swinburne: Oh, Kant is one of the greats of all time. In his depth of vision and his rigor of argument, I think perhaps the greatest of all time. He belongs to everybody’s tradition. He’s part of the canon that all Anglo-American orientated students study, and he’s part of the canon that people on the continent of Europe study. You can’t get argument much more rigorous than Kant. And you can’t get sensitivity to science much more thorough than Kant. And you can’t get depth much more thorough than Kant. I think he is wrong about a lot of issues, but I think that he is one of the greats, perhaps the greatest of philosophers. Veery: When you’re talking about how the Continentals are dealing with literature, you’re thinking of literature as a work to be approached for what it is, without scientific merits or scientific criteria of philosophy? Richard Swinburne: Yes. What I am saying is that quite a lot of what is called philosophy and is taught as significant in philosophy departments in France – and I’m talking about the writing subsequent to Kant, subsequent to Hegel really, the nineteenth century writers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and the more modern writers like Heidegger and Leibniz – tend to present you with a general picture of the world, in the way that an imaginative novelist or poet might do, and this is of course tremendously valuable: it gives you a possible world view; but then I look and ask, “Why should I believe this world view, rather than any other world view?” Well, there may be implicit clues in Nietzsche, why one should believe him, but there’s not an argument in Nietzsche: he doesn’t say, “Well look, here’s my premise, and here are my steps of my argument, and therefore here is my conclusion’; you don’t find that in Nietzsche, any more than you find it in a poem or a novel; you don’t expect to find it in a poem or a novel, but you do expect to find it in some thing called philosophy, and it’s not there in many of the writers who are called philosophers in the Continental tradition.
Veery: Philosophy and social/political concerns. Does one have business with the other? Richard Swinburne: Moral philosophy is certainly a significantly large part of philosophy, and moral philosophy leads to political philosophy. For general views about right and wrong, and how this could be established will lead to conclusions about what the state ought to be doing or what’s the limits to its rights and such like, and that will inevitably lead, in many practically minded people who are convinced by the views of some political philosopher, to detailed involvement in politics; but different people can play different roles in this business.
I have written a bit about moral philosophy, but I’ve written nothing at all about political philosophy. It just happens to be not of my immediate interests, but it’s certainly a proper part of philosophy, and it’s certainly a good thing that philosophers’s conclusions on this matter should influence day-to-day policies. And different people will do the philosophy, and others will apply the philosophy.
Yes, this is certainly a proper consequence of philosophy.
Veery: When you started in philosophy, what did you think of it? What do you think of it now? Richard Swinburne: I was a graduate student at Oxford at the end of the nineteen-fifties and the analytic Anglo-American tradition was going through a rather odd phase at that period. It was the period of what is known as ordinary language philosophy, and basically what most people were doing at Oxford was simply analyzing the meaning of ordinary words. J.L. Austin was the most influential figure, and then classes were held on the meaning of the word “cause” or the meaning of the word “know,” and we would spend our time producing many examples of how the word is used in ordinary discourse, or whatever, and then the person leading the classes would classify these uses. Well, looking back, that was an extraordinary episode – it is of course important to be clear about these words – but what was taken for granted then at Oxford in those odd days was that not merely was this the beginning of philosophy, but it was the end of philosophy; it was almost what philosophy was about, and that I think is very odd. I felt that at the time, but I feel that even more now.
We read the arguments of the classical philosophers, and we tried to give rigorous arguments ourselves, yes, but there was a sort of restriction on the kind of conclusions which it was thought legitimate to reach, and the restriction was that all the philosopher could do was chart ordinary usage; he couldn’t build a metaphysical picture, and that seems to me so wildly against what most philosophers have tried to do that the break is pretty sharp with that. That’s a similarity of method, a similarity of rigor, but there’s a very definitely bigger, much bigger aim for philosophy, and that’s what I welcome in philosophy, before and after this odd episode.
Ordinary language philosophy was rebelling against too much jargon with words which were not clearly defined or used in their ordinary sense, yet it carried its rebellion a long way too far. But I’m glad that period is over.
Philosophy should be constructing a big metaphysical picture and everybody in the Anglo-American tradition just as in the Continental tradition agrees that’s what philosophy’s about.
I think philosophy has made good progress since then in that interesting views have been put forward, and interesting arguments have been developed, and everybody is trying to build a big metaphysically sensitive picture of the world. And in certain ways, I think the actual picture they’ve been building has been going along what I would regard as the right line. Just to take one example, when I was a student, it was taken for granted there weren’t any moral truths, morality was just a matter of emotion or expression or decision to act in some way, but nowadays, probably the majority of philosophers think there are moral truths; I would regard this as not merely developing a metaphysical view, but developing the right metaphysical view. So I’ve seen progress. I’m pleased to be part of it. Veery: So when you were doing this philosophy that you thought restrictive, here you were in classes, kind of appeasing for what you had to do in classes, but then after classes you were sticking firm to bigger issues of philosophy, its role bigger as to what it was in class? Richard Swinburne: Yes, I think that’s right. What interested me, what I thought very important at that time, was science and that it important to understand that and to see what kind of justifications scientists had for their big world views and to try to understand their big world views, whether it was about the nature of the brain or the nature of space and time. And also at that time, almost all the people doing philosophy in Oxford didn’t know very much science and weren’t very interested in it, and they tended to concentrate on the issues raised by more ordinary discourse, and so it was more tempting for them to think mere analysis of words would clarify these issues. Philosophy of science was what I did most of as a graduate student and in my first years of teaching philosophy, and it was a rather different enterprise although it was using the same methods and kinds of arguments, but in the sort of bigness of conclusions rather different from what was going on generally in Oxford at that time, yes. Veery: When this was happening, at the beginning, did you say to yourself, “This will pass, and I’ll get to the more rewarding aspects of philosophy?” Or did you think this was going to lead you somewhere? Richard Swinburne: I thought the methods of careful and rigorous argument would be invaluable but the narrowness of the attempted conclusions – well, I thought I could do better if I tried. Veery: You were doing your own writing, writing things separately, other than what was required for class? Richard Swinburne: No, not so much as a graduate student. I did my first degree, my B.A., and then like most British philosophers, I took a two year course, a postgraduate course called the B.Phil at Oxford, and that was the only postgraduate course (like most of my contemporaries, I don’t have a doctorate), but there was the thesis for the B.Phil, and this was on relations between different sciences, relation of psychology to physics and so on, a very bold thesis, but this was not, as I say, something that the mainstream philosophers at Oxford either knew much about or had very strong views about, so it was a lot easier to draw big bold conclusions there than in areas there were the ground was well-tilled.
Veery: What philosophers do you respect? Richard Swinburne: You respect philosophers for two reasons: either because they get, you think, very near the truth, or because they’ve made very big jumps from where people were before, towards plausible answers to questions but not necessarily ones that you think are true, so one admires different philosophers for different reasons.
If one considers those who have made big jumps beyond where people were before, Kant. I think he must be one of the greatest in that respect, indeed the greatest. But I’d also add Wittgenstein in that.
But if we’re talking about philosophers whom I sort of agree with rather more, even if their jumps aren’t quite as big, I have a great admiration for the medieval scholastics, in particular, for Aquinas and Scotus. There is immense rigor there, very, very thorough working out of positions, positions which I believe are basically correct, though I wouldn’t argue for them in the way that the medievals do.
And, well, I find all the canonical philosophers (what I mean by the canonical philosophers are Plato, Aristotle, then in the modern period, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) to be very stimulating in that they made quite big jumps to very interesting suggestions and gave good arguments for them, but I would especially mention for bigness of jumps, Kant and Wittgenstein, and for nearness to truth if the jumps are smaller, Aquinas and Scotus. And for a philosospher who didn’t write very much but did write very carefully, did get near important truths, I would mention Joseph Butler, the eighteenth century Anglican bishop. Veery: And have you found that you often respect philosophers who you in no way have anything in common with because of maybe the cogency of their arguments? Richard Swinburne: Oh yes, certainly, yes, yes, indeed. I am making the contrast between philosophers whose conclusions I agree with, Aquinas and Scotus, and philosophers who are making big jumps by good arguments to very plausible conclusions or stimulating conclusions, and in the latter, I am including Kant and Wittgenstein. And Wittgenstein is a philosopher whom in the end, I think, goes quite wrong about certain matters, especially about mind and body; but who can deny he’s a very scintillating writer? And one learns a lot from him. I learned a lot about how one needs to defend one’s own position very carefully in order to meet the problems that he raises.
Veery: What do you think about when you look at a blank sheet of paper (or blank computer screen)? Veery: This question pertains to what confidences or worries are with you at the start of a writing project. For example, do you know your end when you start your first paragraph? Richard Swinburne: It’s on paper, and I have a vague idea of where I’m going because I wouldn’t know where to start, or I wouldn’t have thought of writing anything unless I had some ideas of the sort of end I thought I would reach. But it does quite often happen that I reach quite different conclusions from the one that I started out to reach. One has a vague idea of a certain sort of argument, and a certain way of reaching a conclusion, and then when you start writing, and then it turns out the arguments don’t work, and then you look for better ones, and they don’t work either, and then it perhaps occurs to you maybe the conclusion is wrong, so, let’s try and prove the opposite, and well, sometimes that works too. So yes, I’ve got a vague idea at the start, but it frequently turns out a bit different from my original idea.
Veery: What to you is the point of criticism? Richard Swinburne: Invaluable, invaluable philosophically. I think every philosopher worth his salt tries, if you write a piece, to have criticism. My procedure is if I write a paper, I will then read it to different groups. They may be classes in which my graduate students provide criticism. Or I might read it as a lecture at another university, and you’ll get quite a lot of criticism in these circumstances; some of it isn’t very helpful, but some of it is well to the point and will make me change what I have written enormously; I might even argue for the opposite conclusion as a result of it. You can’t see just how strong your arguments are until other people have probed them thoroughly and the more of that the better. I take every opportunity to get it.
Veery: What's the best thing someone could say about your work? Richard Swinburne: Well, that it reached the right result by good arguments. I’d like to think they thought that.
Veery: Would you like to clarify any positions or misconceptions through external sources, people, applied to your work, in a brief way? Richard Swinburne: I think I’ve been lucky, really, in that while I would like more people to have read me than have, certainly, I feel those who have read me have generally understood me. I certainly try to write in such a way that people will understand. There are occasional points that this writer has got me wrong on, and I try and correct them, but in general I think I have been fairly well understood, and that’s nice, so no, there aren’t any misconceptions that I wish to clarify. I think people know what I’m trying to do, or many people do, but of course, I wish, as everybody does, that there was a wider audience for my views, that they were better known especially in certain philosophical circles, and in theological circles, but quite a lot of people know what I’m trying to do, and when they do, I certainly think they’ve understood what I’m trying to do.