A Thursday: Mary Warnock; jurisprudence discussion group; turf tavern

On Thursday, Balliol's weekly lunch seminar, called Doug's lunches for Dean Doug Dupree who nominally hosts, though two second-year undergrads organize it, brought in Baroness Mary Warnock, philosopher and member of the House of Lords (the Baroness is non-hereditary, it's for achievements). I first heard of her two weeks ago when I went to a panel discussion on moral issues surrounding human embryos in research. Her name was used a lot because of a committee she chaired in the early 1980s which set government policy on embryo use for in-vitro fertilization.

I fairly regularly go to these talks as part of my generalized quest for free sandwiches. Usually they are held in Doug's fairly tiny sitting room, which is quite hilarious: it consists of a couch, a chaise longue, three sofa chairs and one or two straight-backed chairs brought in from the other room, a coffee table and a side table with sandwiches. In the first week, they brought in Julian Barbour, a physicist who's just written a book called The End of Time, in which he argues that time does not exist, based on some trying to make sense of the numbers, as physicists do. The room was packed, with people fitting into tiny little corners on the floor right up to the tips of the man's shoes. I had arrived five minutes early and so had one of the comfy sofa chairs. Usually, the talks attract undergrads; even Barbour had maybe one or two other graduate students.

But Mary Warnock's talk was held in the Old Common Room. About 55 students showed up, a little less than half of them grad students. The OCR also doesn't have a lot of tables, so people again sat on the floor, but at least 20 people would have had to leave if it had been held in Doug's rooms.

She's 87 years old and very small with a cap of wispy white hair, and totally charming. She spoke to us about existentialism and its cultural role in 1960s France, and about reading Sartre on a windy beach after having been asked to include him in a book on moral philosophy she was commissioned to write. She then explained that she completely disagrees with the existentialist position that all that matters is authenticity, and stated her view that without morality, society would disintegrate. Her interest is in disentangling morality from religion (which aren't entangled in the first place as far as I'm concerned but I guess for a great many people they are, and people get stressed out about the impossibility of maintaining moral fabric if religion is left behind), and she argued that rather than coming from religion, morality in fact comes first, and informs later religious tenets. The students gave her a pretty hard time, some of them apparently being quite up on Sartre, and others seemingly religious. I was a little worried, which is silly, that they were giving her an old time, because she is fantastically elderly and couldn't really hear some of the questions, and didn't have that quickness that I'm sure she had twenty years ago. Anyhow, she didn't necessarily fully answer all the questions as vociferously as someone else might have, but she didn't duck them either, responding instead with, yes, that's a difficult question right at the centre of the problem, and then speaking around it a little bit.

In the afternoon, the jurisprudence discussion group met to discuss a paper by a youngish member of faculty named Noam G (I'm using the initial to avoid him finding this post if he googles his name; Warnock would have to wade through a lot of sites before she ever found this blog). His paper was on whether legal rules are content-independent reasons, which sounds complicated and technical, and involved diagrams and lots of abstraction, but which sort of boils down to whether people obey rules just because they are the law, rather than because it's a good idea based on the content of the rule (that's in the case of them being content-independent reasons for action). I go to the JDG most weeks because I like the general idea of it, but this paper didn't interest me much. He got a lot of very hard questions afterwards, the hardest of which came from Leslie Green (who grew up five blocks from where I grew up, on Fairmount). Noam mostly had no answers for the hard questions, and said thanks for that, I'll have to think about it, which I thought was good on the level of composure but maybe not great on the level of having command of the subject, though it is a hard subject and one which probably admits many views.

Between these two summaries it's starting to look like I should be writing an analysis of question-answering in special seminars. After the talk, a bunch of the JDG-goers went out for drinks to the Turf Tavern, which is a bar that's only accessible through a winding alley and has coal fires out on its patio, where we talked of many things including the blindness of members of majoritarian cultural groups, corporate moral agency and Wittgenstein (these were not all part of one conversation). Tom, another law dphil and a convenor of the JDG, recommended that I ask the professor of the seminar on Wittgenstein to sit in on his classes, which Tom has done himself. I somehow decided this was a good idea and the next morning, perfectly sober, actually went through with it. I got back a friendly reply and a syllabus. Now I am contemplating the massive reading list they have for each week, and wondering at the wisdom of my choices. I'm also reading Machiavelli for a seminar this week on classics of political thought (which meets once or twice a term). Still, I'm excited about getting back into Wittgenstein, even though it (and all these endless interesting talks) cut into the time I spend working out sentencing principles for corporations.