Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

I never thought I was cut out for a life of crime. I even felt guilty when I accidentally stole a Subbuteo catalogue, thinking it was free. But everyone has an inner rebel, and mine has finally found a natural outlet. My crime of choice is that, with a heart as cold as ice and no care for what society thinks, I steal wireless computer network time.

Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.

Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.

Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.

In the case of Donald Trump I think you've got to accept that a lot of what's going on in political discourse is based upon judgement. How the economy works - how people work - what will come to pass - what will not come to pass - what is possible - what is not possible. There is this whole modal dimension. There's a lot in politics that is making a judgement about what might be and can be and would be. Trump frightens a lot of people but there is a bizarre possible world in which it turns out as he's vindicated, though most of us think the evidence is against it.