Atheists

Do we still need philosophers? Daniel Dennett, who died last week, believed strongly that we do. ‘Scientists have a tendency to get down in the trenches and commit themselves to a particular school of thought,’ he told me from his home in Maine, not long before he died. ‘They’re caught in the trenches so a bird’s eye view can be very useful to them. Philosophers are good at bird’s eye views.’ Scientists of all sorts valued their conversations with him, ‘I think because I could ask them questions that they realised they should have had answers to,’ he said. I grew up with Dennett. First, as a teenager, watching YouTube videos as he raged joyfully against the irrationalities of religion. Then, as an undergraduate, I came to his ideas about consciousness.

The setting was the Gladstone Library, a dramatic, imposing room named after one of Britain’s most cherished politicians, though on closer inspection, its grandeur was somewhat faded. Ornate faïence-tiled columns held up lofty, sculpted ceilings punctuated with chandeliers above mahogany shelves along the room’s perimeter lined with faithful replicas of the 30,000 volumes spanning 17th- to 20th-century political material now safely housed at the University of Bristol. In many ways, this staid, cavernous hall filled with ersatz books at the very heart of the National Liberal Club established by William Gladstone himself is the perfect metaphor for the state of liberalism today.