AC Grayling

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2008

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the philosopher Professor A C Grayling. He was a child growing up in Africa when he was first drawn to philosophy because it offered, he says, a licence to study 'the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour'. It's a study he has undertaken seriously and practically - he has tried his hand at composing music, writing plays and painting - not because he wanted to master those skills, but to acquire a greater understanding of the talents of musicians, writers and artists.

He lives in London with his wife and young daughter and teaches at Birkbeck College, but he remains evangelical about taking philosophy out of the ivory towers and into people's homes - so that it is a practical tool to help people live lives that are engaging and fulfilling. He is motivated, he says, by the knowledge that the human life-span is fewer than a thousand months - and with our time so limited, it is incumbent upon us all to use it thoughtfully and well.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The adagio from the Violin Concerto in D Major by Johannes Brahms Book: The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil Luxury: A good piano.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.
0:27.8	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.3	Hello, I'm Krista Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:35.3	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:38.4	The program was originally broadcast in 2008.
1:13.2	My Castaway this week is the philosopher, A.C. Grayling, praised for combining wide learning with wise argument. He's driven by the need to explore the profundity of our existence and the breadth of life's possibilities. Far from being an ivory tower dwelling academic,
1:18.3	he views philosophy as a practical tool to unearth what is truly important,
1:19.9	and he's been digging for a while.
1:25.1	Age 12, and a schoolboy in Africa, it was discovering Plato that thrilled him.
1:28.1	The thing about being a philosopher was that it meant you could command the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour. That's the beauty of it.
1:33.9	So, Anthony Grayling, commanding the whole horizon of human knowledge and endeavour, it's not a
1:39.1	prospect then you find daunting at all. Well, another way of putting the point is to say that
1:43.4	you're given license by
1:45.2	philosophy to stick your nose into everybody's business and try and find out what they're up to,
1:50.3	why they're doing it, why it matters. And that's the exhilarating thing about it.
1:54.7	So what happened when you were this 12-year-old schoolboy that ignited your interest?
1:59.6	Well, I'd come across references to these great
2:02.6	names, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. And I came across the collected dialogues of Plato in a little
2:09.5	local library, a very eccentric little library, which I think some past British colonial servant
2:15.0	had left behind him. The very, very first volume contained all the early, very accessible, very simple dialogues of Plato.
2:22.3	And by the greatest good luck, I picked one of those and started to read it.
2:25.5	In fact, it was a dialogue called the Carmody's.
	...

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