The philosopher Margaret MacDonald made, what was for some, a controversial claim when she said that we study philosophy for the same reasons that we engage in artistic endeavors. It was controversial because she said this amidst a 1940s philosophical backdrop that claimed that philosophy was in fact more like a science, and not like art at all. MacDonald felt that the claim philosophy should be like science would not reveal its true value and she felt a comparison with the arts was more fitting.

MacDonald thought that just as the philosopher has their beloved thought experiment (Russian Nobleman, Trolley Problem, Ailing Violinist) as a means to reveal the philosophical problem or question in a new light, we also have art. As a teacher of over 20 years, I have regularly used paintings, books, poems and films in the classroom in order to engage a kind of ethical spectatorship (which is an idea linked to Iris Murdoch her ideas about films and how they offer such insights and awakening) and a means to access a new problem, or an old problem, from an alternative position.

For example, when exploring bioethics, I have used Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to explore cloning and organ donation and the idea of the Other, and Bauby, Jean-Dominique’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in lectures considering some of the dominant definitions of consciousness and disorders of consciousness and how new stories show us an alternative perspective. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica opens up questions about the legitimacy of war and John Singleton Copley’s A Boy With a Flying Squirrel moves me from thoughts about liberty, class, domination of man over nature, to how, in fact, we cannot any of us escape nature, and our organic form is forever trapped just like the squirrel. I have watched Guillemero del Torro’s The Shape of Water several times and thought again and again about womanhood, neurodiversity, the myth of beast and man, what it is to have voice, and each time I have found myself adjusting my viewpoint, even if only slightly.

But this is all a bit “in the philosophical armchair”. What about practical applications? Some of the ways I’ve truly seen the value of doing philosophy and how it is like art is when I’ve been doing arts and crafts. We have just completed two workshops as part of the Philosophy In the Wild project, not only exploring philosophical ideas about self, but also about moral communities and what it means to be in relation to others. These workshops included elements of more traditional enquiry discussion, but were focussed on creating colourful maps, listening scrolls and interspecies poetry, making clay seals with a reminder message carved into the creations, all amongst the bugs and birds. The project was inspired by the work of the late philosopher Mary Midgley, who saw that the arts and poetry are crucial for human life, and a key part of the way our nature is expressed as metaphysical animals. The arts give people a larger and more inclusive vision of who we are, what we are and where we are. It helps us to understand our place in nature and the artists’ vision is part of the picture of reality and also hugely enriching and healing.

World Art Day: To Se the Familiar in a New Light

Thinking about the Earth

Hannah Arendt and World-Building Through Photography.