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

Philosophy bites is available at www philosophy bites.

Jonathan Ray is a prolific writer who's tackled a wide range of topics.

His interests include Heidegger, Descartes and Kircagard.

Recently he says he's given up being a full-time academic to be a house husband and to spend more time thinking.

One topic he's been pondering is the link between philosophy and the arts.

Jonathan Ray, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much, hello.

Now the topic I want to focus on today is philosophy as an art.

A lot of people don't think of philosophy as an art,

they think of it as something more akin to

science. You've taught philosophy quite a few years now. How do you see yourself in relation to

art? Well perhaps I should say about myself that I recently gave up being a full-time teacher and that has been a tremendous

liberation and I think my sense of philosophy as an art is something that's managed to flourish

much better since I got off the academic treadmill.

What I mean by describing philosophy as an art is that

I think of myself as a philosopher, which I mean in some ways it seems a rather pretentious thing to do,

I feel that it's a bit like a musician.

I'm not saying I'm Einstein, I'm not saying I'm Plato, I'm not saying I'm Vikenstein,

but I'm saying that I do feel responsible to the standards that are embodied in the great philosophical tradition 2,000 years of philosophy and those are the standards which I try to live up to and by which I feel humbled I suppose I might say.

And it seems to me that that's the position that artists in other fields are in as well. If I was a novelist, I could claim I'm a novelist without pretending that I'm Dickens or Jane Austen, and I feel that I ought to be able to say the same about philosophy. And art also implies that it is a set of skills that you need

to know something about in order to practice it with any hope of success, but it also implies

...