Difficult Choices in the Philosophy Of Trust

Who is your favourite child?

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‘Who’s your favourite child?’ The question no parent can publicly answer — unless they have only one child, but that has to be cheating.

The analogous question for philosophers is ‘who’s your favourite philosopher?’. And for philosophers, that question might be doubly hard.

First, there are so many great philosophers you could pick from. You could go for some grand, complex-yet-intricate world view and opt for a Leibniz or a Spinoza. Or you could go for the hipster’s choice, and find some obscure early 20th-Century European philosopher — you wouldn’t have heard of them, actually, but they totally anticipated all of what Sartre would go on to say… You get the gist.

In essence, there are too many great choices to have favourites.

Second, it’s worth reflecting on a lot of what philosophers do. We don’t look for common ground. We look for arguments. At least, we do in our writings. We actually agree with one another on quite a lot of things, but you don’t see those in print. You won’t, for instance, find me publishing anything in the Philosophical Quarterly, writing ‘Ingram? Yep, he’s totally right about that. The end’.

No, it’s of the nature of philosophical discourse that we use argumentation as…