Letters

William Skidelsky's June "Will's Words" was a treat. If I may add to his examples of an "aptronym"—the term for an especially appropriate name—few can be better than the World Health Organisation's director of HIV/Aids, Dr Kevin de Cock.

Adrian Gahan
London SW6

Hodge and housing
16th June 2007

Julian Baggini (June) argues that Margaret Hodge's view that those who have lived longest in a community should have housing priority should not be condemned as racist. But it is more than disingenuous to let it be inferred, as do both Baggini and Hodge, that migration is largely responsible for the shortage of affordable housing.

Our concerns might have been allayed if Baggini or Hodge had noted that the majority of migrants do not enjoy an automatic right to public housing, and that a significant source of pressure on housing is the growth in single-person households. A balanced critique might also concede that it was the failure of successive governments to respond to the pensions crisis that precipitated the flight of personal capital into property, helping ensure that buying or renting an affordable home is an increasingly distant dream for younger people and those on low incomes.

Baggini and Hodge may not view themselves as racist, but by ignoring a number of contributory factors to the housing crisis, they leave themselves open to the charge of being careless of whipping up xenophobia.

Habib Rahman
Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

Grayling's question 1
5th June 2007

AC Grayling's treatment of the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (June) is a reversion to the parody style of philosophy best known from Beyond the Fringe. When Grayling writes: "When all the chocolates are eaten, there is nothing in the box because there was something there before; you cannot introduce nothing… to a box other than by not putting something in it," we are in a world without irony—the world of trivial "linguistic philosophy" that satirists skewered long ago.

Unlike his illustrious forebears, such as Bertrand Russell, Grayling combines silliness in the face of great questions with the malign energy of Richard Dawkins: "vacuous" and "fatuities" were not words those philosophers would have used; in fact, they are almost disqualifying terms for a philosopher, like obscenities in the mouth of a vicar. Grayling has no interest in the question itself, and fails to make a connection that many, including Leibniz, have in the past—that in some sense, there is only a universe at all because we are here to observe it. Moreover, there was in some sense nothing at all when we were not here, and, if thermodynamics is right, there will again be nothing in the future. This is very odd, and worthy of more serious treatment than a bad parody of 1960s comedy.

Yorick Wilks
Oxford

Grayling's question 2
13th June 2007

AC Grayling continues his short way with philosophy when he "dismisses" the "theistic pseudo-answer" to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" on the grounds that it "arbitrarily invokes an entity equally arbitrarily defined as fully equipped to be the explanation of what is to be explained." Plato, the first framer of the "cosmological proof" of God, thought of this line of objection. He argued that the "One" at the beginning is necessarily eternal; and he had in mind Parmenides's deduction that the One could not be One without being eternal. Grayling dismisses these hypotheses as "vacuous," but they are more interesting and fruitful than his own answer, that the question is based on a mere "category mistake."

What is it about a certain kind of Anglo-American philosophy that makes it the last redoubt of a kind of "white settler" mentality, which regards as terra nullius and treats with contempt almost all of the ways men have thought in the past, and most of the ways they think today?

Robert Jackson
London WC2

Grayling's answer
13th June 2007

Robert Jackson's reversal (Letters, June) of my answer to the question "Does philosophy progress?" in the May issue is admirable for its concision; my effort was merely the distillation of a lifetime's study and several books, so I cannot compete with his attainment of expertise in less than 300 words. Perhaps he thinks of each word as a soldier of Leonidas, frustrating an entire Persia of scholarship of the kind on which lesser mortals have to rely.

Needless to say, he is about as wrong as he could be, based on some peculiar misreadings of history and an associated tendentious (and of course paradoxical) desire to grant religion a part in mankind's efforts to escape from religion. In response, I can only extend an invitation to Jackson to come and study with us at Birkbeck, if he would like to be put right. He will find there that we do indeed know the etymologies of "philosophy" and "enquiry," on which he ventures to instruct me (oh the taste of sucked eggs), his reliance being on the usual unhelpful dictionary definitions of each. But we can assure him that the project of philosophy was and is enquiry—the asking of questions, the tackling of what we do not know or understand—and that by its persistence with intractibilities it did indeed eventually and successively give us the natural and the social sciences.

It managed this (apropos Aristotle and the 17th-century philosophers' rejection of him) by being self-critical, which is an undertaking Jackson might, next time round, consider trying for himself.

AC Grayling
Birkbeck College, London

My brother the bomber
31st May 2007

There was a subtext to your piece on Mohammad Sidique Khan (June) that went something like, "How could he be a mass killer despite being a softly spoken youth worker?"

I am an ex-youth worker, and can tell you that it is a mistake to assume that only "caring" people become youth workers. Most youth workers are caring, but the profession also acts as a beacon to some with darker motivations. It is not only the opportunities for sexual exploitation that attract these people—there are a host of other issues relating to power, and there are softly spoken people out there who are youth workers because they are dark, exploitative and scary.

Richard Katona
London SE8

A Cuban death rehearsal 1
6th June 2007

Most people who know Cuba attribute its austerities largely to the US's 46-year trade embargo. But Bella Thomas (June) seems to suggest that Castro has imposed a blockade on the Americans to perpetuate the poverty of the Cuban people and his revolution. Thomas is also puzzled that so many visitors are intrigued by Cuba, proposing that their reasons lie in "political certainties and the handsome design of the 1950s." For a more convincing explanation, she should examine Cuba's refusal of neoliberalism and its belief in a socialist present (however imperfect) and future. And Thomas refers to the Cuban health service as a distorted icon of the regime, and says she is told that "many" doctors have left Cuba. But she fails to mention that thousands of its doctors have left to deliver healthcare in Africa and Latin America as part of Cuba's foreign outreach.

Lionel Caplan
London N12

A Cuban death rehearsal 2
6th June 2007

I am the son of Cuban exiles and wish to point out one Cuban failing Bella Thomas does not—environmental degradation. Castro demanded that most farmland be devoted to sugar cane, with three harvests a year. This requires slash and burn methods, and each time you burn you lose an inch of top-soil: three inches a year over decades. Prior to 1959, Cuba also had plenty of small rivers, but Castro wanted them to be dammed. Salt water thus went underground and around a million hectares have been affected. The Cuban government admits that 85 per cent of the food consumed in Cuba is imported. This goes beyond mismanagement—it's an ecological disaster.

Digby Solomon
Miami

Divine comedy
30th May 2007

I have one quibble for Julian Gough (May). No jokes in the Bible? A huge book written almost exclusively by Jews and no jokes? Does that sound right to you?

Jesus was always teasing and joking, but we don't see it because we are predisposed to read his words solemnly. When, for example, the Pharisees accused him of casting out devils by using the power of the prince of the devils, Jesus asks, "By whom do your disciples cast them out?" Get it? The Pharisees' disciples weren't casting any devils out, and now they want to opine on how it's done.

Greg Marquez
El Centro, California