Philosophy in Prison: An Introduction

In 399 BC the philosopher Socrates was executed by the Athenians, for impiety (living an impure life) and corrupting the young. He had a conversation with his friends as he awaited execution in prison – about immortality, about the structure of the universe, about the nature of philosophy. He concludes that he should not be afraid to die and faces execution with equanimity (confidence, balance). The equanimity may be too much to ask: but the conversation matters. For philosophy should be something we do, thinking hard in ordered ways about some difficult question, to try to work it out, explain it and figure out where it fits amid our ideas and commitments. This hard thought helps us with the huge questions of reality, value, knowledge and existence. And it helps us with thinking about thinking, and about how we might think together.

We founded the charity, Philosophy in Prison, in the hope that philosophical discussion together may bridge some of the great educational gulfs and frustrations of prison life. For philosophy is a peculiar business with a peculiar response: confronted with one of the big philosophical puzzles – how can we know, for example, that the world we think we see is real? And would it matter if it were not? – pretty much anyone is flummoxed. This flummoxhood, we think, can be exciting, productive and enriching – and the thought it sparks can take us anywhere.

Try a famous paradox: Heraclitus’ ‘you can’t step into the same river twice’. Our first response might be that it is nonsense…. Of course, we can, look!

Here is the same river, and I can certainly step into it twice. Can’t I? Think about rivers flowing, and … perhaps I can’t step into it twice after all…. So which is it? Can or can’t? Or both? Can I really admit that I both can and cannot step into the same river twice? Isn’t that somehow contradictory? If the puzzle catches us, it has an immediate psychological drive – the drive of puzzlement itself.

We ask, not so much about geography, as about logic and argument (about how we think) and then about reality, humanity, value and so on – just, perhaps, how philosophy should be. And a puzzle like this can do that without much baggage. It does not require learned reading, or even any reading at all: but just a kind of human curiosity, across all sorts of boundaries.

Try a different phenomenon: a joke. Jokes have lots in common with paradoxes – they are often strange, incongruous, puzzling. ‘What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?’ … ‘Their middle name’. Jokes work on us together, trading, often, on the drive of puzzlement, but also on there being two of us. Philosophy works the same way. Think about time travel: If time travel is possible, can I go back in time and change my own future? If I can, can I make it so that I never exist? If I never exist, how could I go back in time to change the past? How fixed is the past? What is time like, if I can travel in it? Or if I can’t? I may ask the questions, but the puzzle is the same for us both, just because it is puzzling. In thinking together about it, the questions (and our minds) expand, but we are equal in the face of the questions.

Doing this kind of work together, in a prison, suspends the frameworks of authority for a while, in favour of a common enterprise. It is demanding: each needs to account for what they say, and each learns to take the account of the other: both learn to listen, to hear and to seek to understand the account of another. The perspective of others brings out forcibly that there are others there: that the discussion is indeed populated by others than oneself. And that recognition, in turn, can generate respect, tolerance, even understanding, too. This is what Philosophy in Prison hopes to find.