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I think philosophers are probably quite jealous of science and this is why they come up with all this nonsense to try to show it’s not as reliable as people like to think it is. Look at how successful science is – philosophy is not successful – it’s achieved nothing if philosophy hadn’t existed – “Iwas thinking before you came, apart from Aristotle – what would we not know? The answer is that it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.” I had gone to see the biologist Lewis Wolpert in his North London home expecting to be told the subject at the heart of my work was total rubbish, and he did not disappoint. I first came across his uncompromising views back in 1992 when I saw him give a lecture at University College London. He had nearly finished a captivating talk about his book, The Unnatural Nature of Science, when, almost as an afterword, he briskly dismissed all philosophy of science as having nothing useful to say. What he said must have stuck because when, a few years later, I was putting together a dummy of what tpmwould look like, I included in the contents an interview with Wolpert. It took over a decade, however, before I actually got around to conducting it. Over that time, Wolpert’s star as a public figure has risen tremendously. His book on depression, Malignant Sadness (1999), was a breakthrough success, combining a thorough overview of all we know about what depression is with some very personal sections dealing with his own battles with it. The book spawned a television series, and in 2006 his book on the evolutionary origins of belief, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, was a popular science bestseller. Now 78, Wolpert has not exactly mellowed when it comes to his hostility to philosophers. He is personally charming, but when we got to philosophy, the phrases “totally unintelligible”, “no use whatsoever” and “gobbledegook” were bandied around with a vigour that was somewhere between irritation and zest. We got off to a good start when I asked him when he first came into contact with philosophy. “It was probably in relation to the philosophy of science, and I can’t even remember where it was, but it was quite late in life. I did read Popper’s book, and I hated it. I once wrote that it was the most over-rated book in the last 500 years.” Wolpert had first-hand experience of how scientists worked, and simply found Popper’s ideas about the scientific method had nothing to do with that, and no one else he has come across since has been any better. “Nothing in Popper or in any other philosophy of science has anything relevant to say about science. I don’t know of any scientist who takes the slightest interest in the philosophy of science, although I do think Peter Medawar was quite keen on Popper, to my surprise.” A lot of people who claim philosophy is a waste of time can be tricked into conceding at least something by being drawn into an obviously philosophical discussion about the value of philosophy. With commendable consistency, >>>>>> lastwords/myphilosophy 121 3RD QUARTER 2008tpm

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