In the last few days I’ve been reading a philosophy book. “OMG what is this guy on? He reads philosophy – for fun!”

Well in truth it isn’t a very taxing philosophy book, because what I’ve been reading is The Form of Things by AC Grayling. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and writes regularly for a number of periodicals including my favoured New Scientist. He is also a literary journalist and a broadcaster. So he’s not just a thinker, but he writes well and in an intelligible style.

The Form of Things is a collection of short (mostly 2-3 pages) essays drawn from his recent journalistic writings. Its subtitle: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century tells you precisely what it’s about. It ranges widely over subjects such as language, beauty, funerals, reflections on people, fox-hunting and ID cards. It is a book to dip into rather than read cover to cover; and that’s how I’ve approached it as each of the essays stands in its own right. Let me give you a few gems (the title of each piece is the essay from which it comes). Whether you agree with them or not, they should at least thought provoking…

Dance
At almost any exhibition of contemporary art the thought that crosses one’s mind is: Is this rubbish, or am I missing the point? One could take the view that most of it is indeed rubbish, but of a useful kind: for it takes a lot of compost to make a flower -and flower lovers live in hope. Cynics say that the problem is the existence of art colleges, where people spend their time gluing cereal boxes to bicycle tyres (conceptual art), or demand that people watch them doing it (performance art) …

Hedonism
Human history has been weighed down with ordinances of denial from those who claim to know what the gods want of us – which seems mainly to be that we should not enjoy ourselves, even though they have given us natures attuned to pleasure.

God and the European Constitution
No one has ever fought a war because of disagreements in geology or botany; but humanity has bled to death over the question of whether a wafer of bread becomes human flesh when a priest whispers incantations over it. This stark contrast needs to be taken seriously; for until it is, we condemn ourselves to repeat the futile quarrels of the past.

Humanism and Religion
Religious folk try to turn the tables on people of a naturalistic and humanistic outlook by charging them with ‘faith’ in science or ‘faith’ in reason. Faith, they seem to have forgotten, is what you have in the face of facts and reason […] No such thing is required to ‘believe in’ science or reason. Science is always open to challenge and refutation, faith is not; reason must be rigorously tested by its own lights, faith rejoices in unreason. Once again, a humanistic outlook is as far from sharing the characteristics of religion as it can be. By definition, in short, humanism is not religion, any more than religion is or can be a form of humanism.

Rochester and the Libertines
The word ‘libertine’ was first applied in the 1550s to a sect of Protestants in northern Europe who, with unimpeachable logic, reasoned that since God had ordained all things, nothing could be sinful. They proceeded to act accordingly. Their views were regarded with horror by both Catholics on one side and Calvinists on the other…

Free Speech
It should by now be a commonplace, though alas it is not, that the right response to attempts by violent enemies to coerce our society is to reassert the very liberties and values that make them attack us in the first place. To restrict ourselves out of fear of what they might do is to give them the victory they seek. If they were able to impose their will on our society, they would deprive us of many of the liberties distinctive of a Western democracy. Why do it to ourselves?

Maybe more later.