I had the idea that there were secret laws of the universe that could explain the baffling human reality around me, and that philosophers maybe had the key to them.

Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals.

There's Hobbes, who understood in the 1640s that the sovereign is not an appointee of God, or even a figure of superior virtue and wisdom, but just a functional device whose role is to keep people from hurting and killing each other.

Moral claims aren't, as a class, truth-value apt or not.

About 70% of what I've written about is centered on the clashes and conformities between the emerging life and physical sciences and older metaphysical frameworks in the 17th and 18th centuries. The other 30% consists of one-off essays or researches into other intriguing contemporary topics such as visual experience, aesthetics, social justice issues, and the epistemology of moral knowledge.

I have to say that some philosophers such as the late Bernard Williams, and I would include myself in this group, would say that tranquillity is overrated as the goal of life.

For the chemists, who wanted to manufacture new medicines and elixirs and transform base substances into noble ones, the notion that there was no metaphysical barrier to doing so - it was just a matter of getting the particles into new arrangements - was encouraging. That was the Baconian programme.