When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.

Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood.

Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.

Talking about creating truth tends to alarm people, because truth is meant to be 'just out there'. It doesn't take much thinking to appreciate that we sometimes change truths on the ground - sometimes just by words. A new law will change what is possible. I think - perhaps because the paradigm we follow tends to be scientific, and all about discovery - the creative element of truth is one upon which we don't focus so much attention. This is particularly so in anglophone philosophy, perhaps because we associate it too much with those 'pernicious' continental trends.

You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.