Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with Helen Beebee
Author: David Mossley
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L: 1741-4164
Volume: 7
Number: 2
Start page: 15
End page: 30
Return to vol. 7 no. 2 index page
Continuing our series of interviews with academics with a special interest in teaching issues, David Mossley, Manager of the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, talked to Helen Beebee about her philosophical interests, the role of the British Philosophical Association and the challenges to the discipline in the current higher educational climate. The interview was conducted in Birmingham on 28th February 2008.
Thank you Helen, for agreeing to speak with Discourse. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about your academic background, and how you got into philosophy?
Well I got into philosophy by accident actually. I was going to do a management science degree. I had this vision of myself in a snazzy suit and a cool flat, being an advertising executive, but I had a boyfriend who was a bit of an intellectual and he told me that would rot my brain irreversibly. He thought I should do something more interesting, and suggested philosophy and politics, so I went off to Warwick to do that. I didn't like the politics very much, there was an awful lot of learning things like 23 different systems of proportional representation, so I binned it and concentrated on the philosophy, and took it from there. It all sort of worked out. I didn't really think about having a career in philosophy until I was into my PhD. I liked being at university— reading books and thinking about things and not having to get up early in the morning—and so I thought, 'I'll carry on going as long as I can, and when the funding runs out I'll stop', and it never ran out.
Like a lot of people—more than most people maybe—I had a succession of temporary jobs. I worked at Edinburgh, then St Andrews, then University College London, then I had a post-doc at the Australian National University, and then I finally got a permanent job at Manchester. I was there for six years, and then I came to Birmingham a couple of years ago.
You've researched and written a great deal about Hume, particularly on causation and related matters, and issues such as free will and inductive reasoning. What particularly drew you to these questions, and why do you think they're important?
I think what drew me to the metaphysics was, I was brought up on Quine and Popper when I was an undergraduate at Warwick, so I absorbed the whole Quinean desert landscape aesthetic—you know, don't believe in something unless you really have to, especially when it comes to modality—and also the Popperian anti-inductivist line. Then, when I was a Masters student at Liverpool, Nicholas Nathan got me to read David Armstrong's What is a Law of Nature, which features this little argument about how only a necessitarian about laws manages to escape from inductive scepticism. That struck me at the time as quite a bad argument, and in fact I've just finished a paper now, rather late in the day, on why it's a bad argument. Then when I got to London as a PhD student, everybody was basically an inductivist—I remember David Papineau dispatched falsificationism in about half an hour in the first undergraduate philosophy of science lecture of the year—and I was horrified! So that was what got me started about Humean versus non-Humean metaphysics, and the connection between that and inductive reasoning. The Quinean aesthetic stayed with me, I guess, though I'm a bit more relaxed about induction than I used to be. I think both of those things have affected the way I think about Hume.
It strikes me that one of the ways in which issues about necessity and causation might be important for questions which perhaps are closer to everyday life, is about free will, and the implications for how we discuss free will, and how people are seen to be morally responsible for their actions or not.
Yes, I'm planning on writing a book on free will over the next couple of years. I'm really an old-fashioned compatibilist. I suppose I'm inclined to think that fundamental metaphysics isn't really the most illuminating way of looking at free will, and actually approaching it through the lens of moral philosophy is a more productive way of going, although that's not something that a metaphysician ought to be saying! But that's something I need to think a lot more about. It's very noticeable when I teach free will to third year undergraduates that almost none of them are compatibilists. They are instinctive hard determinists, most of them, or else libertarians, and it doesn't matter how much I tell them that there are lots of really big problems with those views, it's as though they don't see compatibilism as a genuine option. I find the intuitive pull of libertarianism really hard to fathom. I just don't find it a very compelling way of thinking about what happens when you make decisions—the idea that at the very moment in which you make your choice, you could just go either way—but clearly most undergraduates do, and inasmuch as they represent how people intuitively feel about it, it clearly is quite compelling. And it's not clear to me why that's a particularly productive way of looking at how we choose things and how we make decisions. The idea that somehow, despite your character and your upbringing and so on, as a matter of course you could at the last second do something totally out of character or incredibly immoral—chuck the baby over the bridge or stamp on the kitten or leave the restaurant without paying or whatever—strikes me as really odd. It makes people think of themselves as more unpredictable and random than they really are. And I think it's also really odd to take the hard determinist line. I mean, I'm not sure whether anyone really, seriously believes that there's no such thing as moral responsibility. A lot of my students routinely claim to believe it, but they don't act like they believe it. So I think that how you think about free will does have some implications about how you think about yourself.
Do you think that the student obsession with libertarianism is similar to the position often found particularly teaching first year courses in ethics, on relativism, where everyone just says, 'we're all moral relativists'?
I hadn't thought of that connection actually. It's certainly true that most students are moral relativists. Again, in my third year metaphysics course I do a few weeks on global realism and anti-realism and I get into it by putting sentences up on the board and asking the students whether it's speaker relative or indexical or whatever. They get the ordinary ones right, you know, 'George Bush is the president of the US'—they all think that's objective—but as soon as you get to a moral one 95% of the class think that that's speaker relative. It never ceases to amaze me just how relativist students are. I find it incredibly bizarre how pervasive that view is, despite the fact that, again, I'm not sure how much people really believe it. Because when you try and press them by saying 'are you saying that someone who's a mass murderer is no worse a person than you?' they start feeling a bit uncomfortable. I think they want to be moral relativists but they also want to think that genuine moral disagreement is possible, and they need to decide which it's going to be.
I hadn't thought of a connection between that and libertarianism. Maybe it's some sort of deeply seated thought that what you do is completely up to you and is nobody else's business, so similarly what you think is right is completely up to you and nobody else's business, and nobody can criticise you for doing the wrong thing.
It's an interesting question. How do you think this might affect the way we understand what a person is, and how education might work for them? With your view on free will, do you think there's a connection there? Because often a metaphysical position carries with it that sort of content about what a person is, and one view of education is that it's about understanding what people are and how people change, and how they can be encouraged to change themselves. So I wondered if you saw any connection there?
Yes, well again, going back to the issue with libertarianism, you are what you are, so if you want to get better at philosophy, or anything else for that matter, you have a certain starting point—you can't just decide that you're going to get better at it, so that improvement naturally follows. People may decide in principle, but when you get students coming in at the beginning of the year, saying, 'I know last year my attendance was terrible and I handed all my essays in late, but this year I'm going to be different', that's just unrealistic. The idea behind it is maybe, 'I can just switch over and become a completely different kind of person just like that, because it's an undetermined decision', and we all know that's not going to work—you have to put a lot of effort into changing. This isn't a criticism of libertarians, but maybe it's bound up with a kind of common-sense understanding of libertarianism. All of these things take a lot of effort and you have to train yourself to be the kind of person who can sit down and read a philosophy book for six hours without falling asleep, and I think a standard compatibilist view about free will, on some common sense level at least, encourages you to think this is all hard work, you are the kind of person you are, and if you want to become a different kind of person you're really going to have to work at it.
So what do you think education is then?
I don't know what education is! That's a philosophical question I haven't thought about. I think in the case of philosophy it's a matter learning how to do something, learning how to do philosophy, and this is something that I really try to impress on prospective students. It's normally in the context of explaining to their parents why they have so few contact hours. But I try to get them to understand that they have to go away and do the work for themselves. It's learning how to work out what's going on in an argument, working out what the underlying assumptions are, learning how to criticise things, and learning how to think creatively so that you can come up with your own problems and solutions. In that context education is more about helping the students achieve that, rather than forcing a load of information down their throats. It's like learning to play the piano—you can have good piano teachers or bad piano teachers, but simply sitting there with a teacher hour after hour is not very helpful. At some point you just have to go away and practise your scales.
So what do you think are the key abilities, or skills, that a student needs to be successful in a philosophy programme?
They need to be able to think very hard for extended periods of time. I think that's a skill that students often underrate—philosophy's just very difficult, and you have to stick at it, and thinking very hard is just really hard work, it's really tiring and you have to be in the right frame of mind to do it. They also have to be creative, to be able to think of arguments or positions or whatever for themselves. Again that can be quite hard, coming from A-level, it can take them a while to realise that we really do want them to have a go at criticising someone's view, and not merely repeat what various people have said and construct it into an argument that's completely derivative. And they also need to be very good at expressing themselves. Again, philosophy is very hard, there are a lot of technical concepts, a lot of difficult ideas and arguments, and it's depressing when you read an essay and you think that maybe they've had a really good idea, or they've made a really nice move, you just can't quite understand what it's supposed to be, because they can't get it down on paper. Again, that's just something they seem to improve at, as they go through, but it's hard to know how to give advice to the students that find writing really difficult. Yes, so hard work, and the ability to think and the ability to express yourself.
I think that sounds right to me. The issue of philosophy being difficult, the technical side and the hard work that's required to understand abstract ideas is right, it does present students with a great deal of problems sometimes, and do you find, as many philosophy teachers find, that it's not just the expressing an idea that's the difficult bit, it's the justification, having an opinion of someone's interpretation of a text in front of them tends to be one problem that they have to overcome, to find their own, and then to go beyond that to say, 'I can justify this because…' or 'I can construct an argument to show that…'?
Yes, again, that's something that they're not very good at when they come in, but they get better at it.
How does that happen? How do they get better at it? Is it just the piano playing?
Yes I think it's a lot like the piano playing. We encourage students to have a pop at coming up with their own arguments, right from the beginning, right from the first year, and I think that's important. When I was doing the teaching course at Manchester—the precursor to the PGCHE I guess—there was this exercise where you got a list of words, like 'discuss', 'summarise', 'compare', 'criticise', and so on, and you had to say which level of undergraduate study they were appropriate for. I think that approach is just totally wrong, at least for philosophy. The first year would be so boring if all the students were expected to do was summarise what other people have said. Of course they find it hard to come up with their own arguments or objections to start with, but they're repeatedly given feedback, saying 'Well that bit was a really good idea, but you squashed it into two sentences, why didn't you write the whole essay on that?', or 'there was a big leap, you went from this to that, and I can't really see the connection between them,' and I think it's just the process of trying it lots of times, seeing whether it works and having someone tell you whether it has worked or not. Obviously also they're exposed to a lot more arguments as they go through, and they're reading arguments all the time, so it's a matter of seeing other people's arguments, trying to emulate the kind of form they take, and just gradually improving at it. You'll be better at playing piano sonatas if you listen to Alfred Brendel doing it and try and figure out why he sounds better than you do. Well, once you've got the notes in the right order anyway.
How do you think that philosophy teaching has changed during your career?
When I look back to when I was at Edinburgh or St. Andrews, there are far more students now than there were then. The number of students just seems to go up and up, and that has a big effect on how you teach. It's very different teaching a seminar with twelve students to how it is when you've only got three of them. And of course the kinds of students that you get have changed a lot. I think that's something that maybe some philosophers have been a little slower to pick up on than they might have been. I just don't see that there's any point in whining about how the average standard of students isn't as good as it was 15 years ago—of course it's not as good, because when you're taking 50 students a year rather than 20, the average standard is going to be lower. There hasn't been any miraculous improvement in the intelligence of 18-year-olds over the last 15 years! You just have to learn to get on with it and adapt.
I think just the sheer number of students affects what you can teach them, and how you teach them. You need to think about all kinds of things, like how they can get access to the texts they need, how to organise seminars when there's lots of people there rather than a few, what you can realistically achieve in a lecture so that pretty much everyone knows what's going on rather than just the ten best students in a class, those sorts of things, so that's changed a lot.
I don't know if students are more demanding now, but they certainly get a lot more than they did when I started out. I hate to say anything good about quality assurance, it did lots of bad things, but I think that one good thing that the whole subject review thing did was to force people to treat students better. We pay much more attention now to whether they can get adequate access to resources, or whether they're getting good feedback on their work, and I think it was good that we were forced to think about those things, because as I say, it's quite easy to just carry on doing what you've been doing while the student profile changes radically. Quality assurance made people adjust. I'm not sure that was the intention of the whole thing, but I think that was something that happened.
The students get much better access to resources, I think, though a lot of that has to do with access to e-journals and e-books and the Stanford Encyclopedia and things like that. Also, it's kind of trivial, but I use a PowerPoint presentation in class, and I stick it on the web, and they can look at it afterwards, whereas before I would've done it on OHP slides and that would be it, they'd go in my drawer, so now they don't have to sit there scribbling down everything I say, they can sit and listen, and they know they can go and look at it again afterwards, and pedagogically that's an improvement. And again, this is something that's been forced on us a bit, but I think it's a good thing—though I know some of my colleagues would disagree with that.
Students get a lot more feedback too. We spend a lot of time in the department kind of trying to work out the essay deadlines so that they're handing some essays in really early in their first year, so that they get them back in time for them to be able to think about what they're doing wrong for the next essay. Certainly when I was an undergraduate there was no consideration given to those sorts of things. Classic feedback was a few things scribbled in red pen. I remember one essay I got back the day before my Kant final—which I did appallingly badly in, though probably not for that reason—and it had a single comment on it, which was something like 'I don't think I agree with you', and no grade. That wouldn't happen now. Well, not in my department anyway.
I think another sin that we can commit as academic philosophers is to look at students and think, 'I didn't find this hard when I was a student, what's the matter with them?'. Well, you're a professional philosopher, you weren't anything like an average student. When you look at the cohort of 100 students in the third year or whatever, maybe one or two of them, at absolute tops, are going to make it as far as doing a PhD, let alone being a professional philosopher. We're not normal, and you can't treat your students as if they were mini versions of you, because hardly any of them are going to be as good as you were when you were a student. Well actually, I was a distinctly average student in my first two years as an undergraduate, now I think about it. My tutor told me I had no chance of getting funding for an MA. I don't know whether he was just being realistic or whether he was trying to get me to get my act together, but anyway it had a dramatic effect.
You say you put your PowerPoint presentations on the web—do you use any other e-learning methods, such as electronic discussion forums?
We have WebCT which I hate, it's so clunky. It has a discussion forum and I sometimes try to get students to use it, and they just don't. I think, with those kinds of things, if you really invest a lot of energy, encourage them and help get things going, they will start to use it, but I'm just not sure it's worth the investment of time and effort. When I taught logic, I used quite a lot of electronic stuff. I used to use Tarski's World, which is a really nice program. It comes with a textbook, and there are lots of automated proofs that you can do, and it will grade them automatically, so it'll show you where your mistakes are. And there are also lots of little on-line logic test programs out there. There was another bit of software called Reason-Able, where you constructed flow charts of arguments, where you would put in the reasons for the conclusion, an objection to this reason, and so on. That was really nice. When I stopped teaching logic, I stopped using it, but that was the place where there was real scope for using a lot of e-resources and I think they were really helpful, because it means that students, if they are motivated to do it, can get so much extra help than what you can give them in a lecture and a seminar a week, and a bunch of ten exercises for them to do for the problem class. But I'm finding that with non-logic subjects, I really do the basics, I'll give them some links to some web resources, and stick my stuff on WebCT and that's it.
Do you think that there's a difficulty in using electronic forums which lack the face to face component that a seminar has, in a subject like philosophy, which is so discursive, where so much more can be communicated than words, in a face to face context?
Well, I suppose the way that we assess students is through written work, and I think that one thing a lot of students are not very good at is getting things down on paper, so in some sense, I think a written version of a philosophical discussion could be quite valuable. If you can't communicate something in words, you're not going to make a very good philosopher. One thing you learn very quickly is that it's a lot harder and more time-consuming to write something down than just having a chat with someone, and maybe that's a valuable thing for them to learn. I think that when you're writing something down you're forced to be much more precise about what you say, you can't just wave your hands around at the end of a sentence and say, 'that's the kind of thing I mean', you've got to say exactly what it is that you mean. So in principle I can kind of see the value in it. It would mean that students were spending more time writing philosophical stuff outside of an assessed environment, and I can see how that might be a valuable thing. If someone posts saying, 'I really don't understand this bit of the reading' or something, and then another student actually sits down and explains to them in writing, that's just the kind of thing we want them to do in essays, so it could be good. But yeah, it's a lot of work, and students also hate WebCT. If students could do it on Facebook then maybe it would work better, but that's a road I'm not going to go down.
You're currently the Director of the British Philosophical Association, the BPA. What role do you think that philosophy has in the wider public debates, in public policy? I know that's not officially the BPA's remit, but it is basically the sole professional body for philosophers in the UK.
Yes, well that's a very topical question, because there have been a lot of moves coming from the government and filtering through the AHRC, and the other research councils, to talk in terms of the impact of research, and I think it's very difficult, at least for philosophers like me who are working in pretty abstruse realms of philosophy, to make a case that we really have any kind of direct impact. Certainly when the government talks about impact, they tend to mean economic impact, which just demonstrates an incredibly narrow-minded conception of the value of intellectual enquiry, but there are obviously some bits of philosophy that feed very well into policy debates. For the rest of us it's harder and we should probably think more about how the case can be made that we are doing something that's valuable to society, without being able to point and say, 'here's the direct impact'—or worse, 'here's the economic impact'.
Philosophical questions are really important. It matters—and not just to professional philosophers—whether children get taught Creationism as science, or whether the practices of other cultures can be morally criticised, or whether the findings of mature sciences genuinely conflict with what's written in some religious text, or whether we're merely puppets pulled by the strings of the forces of nature, or whether God exists. Perhaps the philosophical community as a whole could make more effort to engage directly with the public with those kinds of debate, but in the end if nobody's actually doing the research, it'll just be the same debate getting endlessly recycled and progress will just stop.
I suppose that one just has to tell a story about the enrichment of knowledge for its own sake, but I don't know to what extent the government wants to hear that, so yes, it's a tough one. I mean, on the teaching side, you can always tell a story about the kinds of citizens that you're churning out at the end of it, who have the kinds of skills and personal abilities that people in business or the civil service or whatever it is should have, but that's very different from saying that the research itself is serving a wider good, and it's very difficult to do that, to make that case to people for whom the expansion of knowledge for its own sake, the pursuit of truth for its own sake isn't a good enough answer.
Because otherwise, the subject ends up being reduced to a set of skills, which is not the way forward, I think.
Absolutely. It would be terrible if a philosophy degree just came to be seen as a way of picking up skills X, Y and Z that some people happen to prefer to some other degree that inculcates similar skills. Philosophy graduates might be well-equipped to apply their skills to various kinds of employment, but they're also well-equipped to think really hard about very deep questions. That doesn't do you much good in the context of working in HR, but it enriches you as a person, just like being able to get a lot out of poetry or being able to sit down at the piano and play Bach does.
What do you think are the other most pressing factors driving change in the UK and internationally? We've discussed issues around the economic impact of the subject, but are there any other factors that you think are driving philosophy? It's quite a trend-driven subject in some senses, in that subject areas will go up and down and have interest and then die away again.
I'm not sure how trend-driven it is. When I started doing my PhD in London everyone was talking about David Lewis, who I'd never even heard of. One thing that happened in the causation literature was, Lewis had the counterfactual analysis, people would spit out some counter-examples, and then people would try and add some epicycles, and then someone would come out with some more counter-examples, and for me at least, I gave up on that debate, because the theories were so hard that it was just too much effort to work them out. They were kind of like these mysterious black boxes where you'd feed in a standard counter-example, crank the handle and see whether it spat out the right answer, and I couldn't work out what the mechanism was, and at that point I started thinking OK, I don't like doing this any more, and started worrying about the broader issues to do with Humeanism, because I just found it more philosophically interesting. And other people started thinking about other ways of analysing causation, or thinking that maybe the counterfactual analysis picks out one kind of causation, or it somehow connects to our concept of causation but can't be used as the basis for a reductive analysis. So the debate's moved on.
I think looking at the debate from the outside, it might look trend-driven, but in fact there are good reasons, I think, why certain questions or approaches have waned in popularity and others have surfaced. Probably a lot of philosophical debates are like that.
On the other hand I'm sure some things just drop in and out of fashion for reasons that don't have much to do with the internal dynamics of the research programme, if I can put it like that. For example there seem to be loads of undergraduates really interested in philosophy of religion now. I guess religion is getting a lot more press recently, but also—I suppose relatedly—we're getting lots more students who've done Religious Studies A Level and I'm sure that's driving it. That might easily have a knock-on effect within the profession at the research level, as some of those undergraduates go on to be the next generation of PhD students, and if departments start offering more undergraduate courses in philosophy of religion and look to hire people who can teach it.
I suppose another thing that's having a bit of an effect on philosophy is the focus on interdisciplinary work. Again that's partly what some philosophers would be doing anyway, but it's something that people are maybe encouraged to do because universities and funders are pushing for it. There's much more interdisciplinary work going on than used to happen, and I'm sure everyone's university is sending out the message that we should do more of it. I think one thing that's really distinctive about philosophy is the massive range of different disciplines that you can work with, I've got a colleague who works with a psychiatrist, we have people working with theologians, people in religious studies, politics, medicine, and so on, and it's obvious because that's in the nature of what philosophy is, that you can take pretty much any discipline and raise philosophical questions about it. And I think that's a good thing, and something that leads to philosophy becoming something that people in other disciplines, and maybe the wider public, engage with more than otherwise they might.
Is that reflected in teaching, do you think?
That is a good question, and the answer is not much, in general, I guess. You'll do philosophy of science, or social science, or philosophy of maths, or whatever it is, but a lot of the time when people teach those topics, they're not teaching it in an interdisciplinary way. For example, a lot of philosophy of science is not at all interdisciplinary, there's nothing interdisciplinary about learning about the problem of induction, or reading Lakatos or whatever. I think when you get into the harder stuff and you start really knowing a lot about physics, say, and being able to engage physicists in philosophical discussion, then it starts becoming interdisciplinary, but that's not what you get in an undergraduate philosophy of science course. I guess interdisciplinary stuff could be worked into the teaching a lot more than it is, but at undergraduate level—while I don't at all think it's a bad idea—I don't think it's something I would argue for as a good in itself. And certainly universities who are keen on promoting interdisciplinary research don't seem to be pushing at all for it on the teaching side, or at least not as far as I know.
If teaching philosophy were more interdisciplinary, and therefore a crucial subject to maintain subjects which, in themselves, were able to demonstrate a greater feed into the economy in terms of skills and so on, would this evidence a greater impact of the economic kind, that we were talking about earlier, do you think?
Well, I certainly think it would be a good thing if philosophy was confined less to philosophy students. I'm sure students in the sciences and maths and whatever could get a lot out of thinking philosophically about their disciplines. But that's not interdisciplinarity, it's just aiming particular bits of philosophy at a broader audience. Like I said earlier, I just don't think the game of trying to demonstrate economic impact is one that we should have to be playing. There's a strong skills-based argument for saying if you want well-qualified employable graduates, philosophy gets you that. So that's a kind of economic impact. But on the research side even the applied and interdisciplinary parts of philosophy are never going to have a strong argument that they are benefitting the economy in some identifiable way—except of course in the sense that it helps to keep academics and publishers and librarians and booksellers in a job—so I just hope that that's an argument we can avoid having to make, because philosophy as a whole won't do well out of it.
Which educator do you think, teacher or person, has had the most impact on you in terms of philosophy, and why?
Well, I guess that takes us back to the beginning of the conversation. When I was an undergraduate at Warwick in the 1980s, I had two teachers, Susan Haack and David Miller, who intellectually had a really big impact on me, and not just because I absorbed some of their views—the Quinean love of desert landscapes and the anti-inductivism I mentioned before. I mean, it was a pretty remote kind of influence, in the sense that I was a pretty detached undergraduate, I just did the work and went to the lectures and seminars and that was it, but they were both philosophically very hard-nosed and I think had quite high expectations, they didn't take any prisoners. Or that's how they seemed anyway. Obviously that doesn't work for everyone, but I was basically your get-a-2:1-without-trying-very-hard kind of student, and their classes were the ones that made me think, this is really interesting, I actually want to really think about this and not just knock up an essay the night before the deadline.
And what would you say was your greatest achievement to date, as a philosophy educator? As a teacher?
This is a kind of bureaucratic answer to a question about pedagogy, but I think maybe the places where I've had the biggest effects have not been standing up in front of the class. It's been more on the administrative side, spending a lot of time on staff/student committees, or as head of department or whatever, thinking about what it is that students want and need and how to give it to them—what are their main problems and how do we help them overcome them. Are they doing too much assessment or not enough, how do we help first-years get into the subject and into thinking for themselves, which modules are they finding too difficult or not challenging enough, that kind of thing. Those kinds of issues are hard because students aren't all the same, and also because you have to try and get other people on-side, whereas when it's just you teaching your module if something's not working you can just change it yourself and see first-hand whether it's worked. So anyway I try to think about the overall view of what they're getting as philosophy students, helping them to do better, and to enjoy it more, and I think it's in that general way that I feel as though I've had most influence on how things have gone for students, I hope mostly for the better and not for the worse.
Thank you Helen.
Thank you.
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
