Skeptics in the Pub, Oxford

2 September 2015

There's been a trend recently for some eminent scientists to write off philosophy as a discipline which fails to meet the criteria for scientific enquiry. This is a bit of a puzzle for some philosophers, who didn't actually realise that they were supposed to be doing scientific enquiry in the first place. And anyway, say the philosophers smugly, these scientists are working with some pretty questionable epistemological principles.

This is all quite sad, because science and philosophy are both brilliant and they'd both be even more brilliant if they could talk like grown-ups. But at some point, too many philosophers and scientists seem to have just stopped listening to each other. In response to this problem, this lecture is one of a pair (the other one being 'Why philosophers should listen to scientists') which are intended to get a better dialogue going between the two disciplines than has existed of late.

Charlie Duncan Saffrey is a philosopher, writer and stand-up comedian who has studied at the universities of Liverpool, Warwick and Sussex, and this year he is a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster. He is the founder and host of 'Stand-up Philosophy', a live philosophy night which brings comedians, philosophers and experts together to answer philosophical problems. He lives in East London with some actors and a small collection of seashells.