Episodi

  • Not Yet

    Not Yet
    Oct 23 2026
    It said, in my handwriting: present to follow. Nothing has followed it. A card left on the gift table at a wedding fourteen months ago, in his own handwriting: present to follow. Nothing has followed it, and on Saturday the couple are coming to his flat for dinner, at his invitation. He has had their list open more times than he could tell anyone, with two things sitting in a basket, one of them a good deal dearer than the other; once he reached the page that asks for the long number and closed the tab; and every Sunday evening, at the bottom of the diary page, he thinks: this week. The companion brings Book Three of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where wish relates to the end and choice to the means, and hears that Sunday sentence, and his saying he still means it, as naming an end and no act. Then it completes his deliberation for him in Aristotle’s own order, from the doctor who does not deliberate whether he shall heal to an object of choice already determinate, on the assumption that his end was fixed on the morning he wrote the card. He has two dates for the two things in the basket, and giving them costs each of them something.
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    10 min
  • Diversion

    Diversion
    Oct 20 2026
    Every Thursday I collect my son from swimming. I get there ten minutes before he’s out, on purpose, and then I can’t stay in the car for the ten minutes. Ten minutes in a car park every Thursday, arrived at on purpose and impossible to sit through. He collects his son from swimming, turns the engine off and gets straight out: a row of garages, the back of the leisure centre, a noticeboard in the foyer with nothing on it he needs and read all the way down, and a chocolate bar from the machine by the door that is usually still in his coat when they get home. Last Thursday the session finished early, the boy came out to an empty car and asked where he goes, and was told it was just stretching his legs. The companion brings Pascal’s long note on diversion: the philosophers who think a whole day spent chasing a hare unreasonable and scarce know our nature, the hunters who do not know that it is the chase and not the quarry they seek, a king left with nothing to divert him, and the sentence about men who cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. It finds the same arrangement in the radio, the podcast and the list, takes the bar for the hare, and then answers the boy’s question with the reason Pascal gives for the chamber, at the size of a mortal condition, quoting the man out after a boar in support of how far the account reaches.
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    12 min
  • Bad Luck

    Bad Luck
    Oct 16 2026
    On Saturday night I reversed over my friend’s cat, on her drive. A cat reversed over at walking pace on a friend’s drive on Saturday night, after a look underneath with the torch on a phone found nothing there, and four apologies since that have changed nothing for the man who made them. His friend answers each one that it could have been anyone’s car, everyone he has told says he ought to stop saying sorry, and he agrees with all of them and walks round to her door again. The companion brings Bernard Williams’s 1976 paper ‘Moral Luck’ and its lorry driver who, through no fault of his, runs over a child: the feeling Williams calls agent-regret, which is by no means restricted to voluntary agency, and which people will rightly try to move a driver out of, though some doubt would be felt about a driver who moved too blandly or readily to the place of a spectator. Then it casts the evening into the parts of the example, with the friend among the people who comfort and the apologies as the action that expresses the feeling, and offers that as a reading of the example and not as advice from Williams.
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    10 min
  • The Shorter Way Round

    The Shorter Way Round
    Oct 13 2026
    I sold my car at the weekend, to a man who came from the advert, and the clutch slips. A car sold at the weekend to a man who came from the advert, and the clutch slips. Asked out the front whether it had given him any trouble, the seller said it had sailed through its annual safety check in March, which it had, and the check does not cover the clutch. The buyer said that would do him, folded away the questions he had written on an envelope, took it round the block and paid. The companion brings H. P. Grice’s ‘Logic and Conversation’, which separates what a man says from what he implies by saying it, and works the buyer’s side out step by step: the presumption that the seller was cooperating, the maxim about being as informative as is required, and the first item on Grice’s list of ways to fail one, the quiet violation liable to mislead. Then it draws the line between misleading and lying where two philosophers who came after Grice draw it, Timmermann and Viebahn, and finds something in the seller’s favour.
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    10 min
  • The Reminder

    The Reminder
    Oct 9 2026
    A man at work asked me where he ought to go in Brittany, and I sent him to an afternoon I’d written down as the best of my week there. Four years of small notebooks, a couple of months in each, all on one shelf. A man at work asked where he ought to go in Brittany, and he sent him to an afternoon he had written down three summers ago as the best of the week: the harbour wall out to the lighthouse, rain from about three, fish soup by the slipway. Then he was asked what was so good about it, and said the view, before he had thought about it. There is nothing in the notebook about a view, and he does not know where he got it from. The companion brings the story Socrates tells in Plato’s Phaedrus, where the king of Egypt hears out the god who has invented letters and tells him he has found an elixir not of memory, but of reminding. What follows turns on what came back from within, and what came only off the page.
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    10 min
  • Under a Description

    Under a Description
    Oct 6 2026
    I’m putting a new fence up between my garden and next door’s: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest. A new fence is going up between two gardens: six foot of close-board where the old one came up to his chest, the posts already in and the panels due on Friday. Next door has a greenhouse at the bottom of his garden, and on Sunday he stood looking at the posts and said that was his tomatoes finished. The man ordered in August, knowing where the greenhouse stood, and the yard will still swap the panels for shorter ones with a foot of trellis on top, up to twelve on Friday. The companion brings G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention, in which one action can carry many descriptions at once, and a man pumping poisoned water gives four of them in a line, each the means to the next. It lines the man’s reasons up the same way, puts next door’s tomatoes among them, and is asked where it got that.
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    10 min
  • Attention

    Attention
    Oct 2 2026
    On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven’t got a sentence of it. On Sunday a friend asked him out for a walk along the river and told him something on the way. He has not kept a sentence of it. He knows it mattered: she had never asked him for a walk before, she stopped twice on the towpath and the second time she was crying, and at the bridge she said she would tell him the rest when it was settled. She has no idea that any of it is gone. The companion brings Simone Weil’s essay on school studies, where attention is a negative effort and consists of suspending our thought, and where the exercise that has gone wrong is traced back to the origin of each fault. The tracing turns up one line he said, and then the order of the walk comes out wrong, and the companion has to say which part of the fault was its own.
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    10 min
  • What I Would Rather Want

    What I Would Rather Want
    Sep 28 2026
    I wouldn’t write to him, no. I’d know he’d looked, and that would do me for a good while. On Friday night he put up three photographs of a table he had made, and since then he has opened the page every time he passes the table, to go down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name: a man he has not spoken to for two years. He would have the wanting taken out of him tonight, if anyone could. One Tuesday morning he shut the laptop without going down the list, and cannot say what shut it. The companion brings Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, gives him the unwilling addict and the wanton, and then proposes an arrangement: log out everywhere, and let somebody else set the password. An evening with the internet down along the whole street tests it. What such an arrangement would secure, and what it would cost him, turn out to be different questions.
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    10 min