This is a philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

Philosophy bites is available at

www philosophy bites.com.

Aland de Botan is a best-selling novelist and essayist, many of whose books touch on philosophy,

although only one, the consolations of philosophy does so head on.

The consolations of philosophy sold hundreds of thousands of copies,

but some professional philosophers are tactic with vitriol.

Here de Boton reflects on his conception of philosophy and what he thinks he's done to so offend the academy.

Alan de Botan, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

I'd really like to talk to you today about what philosophy is.

But first of all, how did you get interested in philosophy?

I think I started by being interested in the subject

for a position of complete ignorance

and a feeling that something interesting lay in that word.

It was a mysterious elusive word.

I didn't quite know what it was, but I felt, just as one does sometimes feel with things,

that if I got to know it better, it might be interesting. I then saw myself as someone who wanted to write books in general rather than philosophy books. I wrote four books that really had nothing in particular to do with philosophy.

The three of them were novels, one of them was a non-fiction book about Proust.

And then for my fifth book I wrote a book which looked at six philosophers in particular who were not mainstream philosophers but there were people who interested me people like Seneca

Epicurus Schopenhau and Nietzsche they're often the sort of philosophers that appeal to literary types and I think philosophy has always been a subject that's had its different wings.

One extreme you get people who are closer to mathematicians who are attracted to pure logic.

...