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

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Mark Rowlands, a Welsh-born Florida-based philosopher, has written a book about living with a wolf.

But Philosophy Bites talk to him about another aspect of his life, which he got into as a way of wearing out the wolf, running.

Here he warms up with Descartes and then stretches the pace with a bit of existentialism.

Mark Rowlands, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you, Nigel.

I'm delighted to be talking to you.

The topic we're going to focus on is philosophy and running.

I wonder if you could say what the connection between those two is.

Well I think there are actually lots of connections. Let me give you one example though. I think the running

can be divided into four stages and at each stage useful philosophical ideas

sort of emerge or can be sort of understood I think quite well. The first stage is what

we might call the embodied self.

When you get to my age, you're either injured or you're about to be injured.

So when the run starts off, I'm a sort of fully embodied self and my attention keenly tuned to anything that might go wrong, you know, is my calf going to hold out?

What does this tightness in my hamstring mean?

Should I stop running or should I not?

So that's the first stage, the embodied self.

Well, we can all feel embodied in other activities too. I mean as soon as we start to do anything as an activity we are aware usually of being a person who is also a body.

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