This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton and me, David Edmunds.

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I'm fed up with Philosophy Bites. It's been going on for so many years and frankly it's

becoming tiresome. The philosophers have nothing original to say and that I have to spend

hours editing them to make them sound halfway coherent. But anyway, enough winging, here's

Agnes Callod. Agnes Callod, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks so much, Nigel. The topic we're going to discuss today is

complaint. Now that's not obviously a philosophical topic. Could you perhaps say why you've chosen

that topic? There isn't too much philosophical work on it though. There is a bit. I mean I

find it actually strange that philosophers aren't more interested in it. I think it's a huge

part of our lives. We spend a lot of time complaining. As a parent, I spend a lot of my

time listening to complaining. And just something that fascinates me about complaint is that

we tend to like to produce it more than to receive it. I'm interested in forms of speech

that are like that. It's also true, I think, of advice. I think people tend to like giving

advice more than getting it. And I find that to be interesting that there are communicative

phenomena that are asymmetric in that way. But I also, I just think complaint properly

understood expresses something very deep about the human soul. So it gives us access to

something about ourselves if properly understood. I can see that very good advice could be

well received. I can't really think of a situation where I'd be delighted that something

complained. Complain seems to have built into it something negative. There's something

wrong that I've done. Yeah, so I think that we often enjoy complaint. There are many

...