The joy of discussing life’s great questions with a philosopher friend

At an improbable soirée in 1987, Mike Tyson was making aggressive sexual advances to the young model Naomi Campbell when the septuagenarian philosopher A.J. Ayer stepped in to demand that the boxer desist. ‘Do you know who I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,’ snarled Tyson. ‘And I,’ replied Ayer, ‘am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our fields. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’ And while Campbell sensibly slipped away, the odd couple did just that.

The Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard relates this story not just to clinch the slightly self-serving professional point that philosophers aren’t always useless in real-life situations, but to propose that Tyson himself was probably delighted to find that an intellectual treated him as an equal rather than as a pugilistic meathead.

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This respect, Callard suggests, is not just what is necessary for two philosophical interlocutors but a basis for equality that rarely exists in our thin-skinned, offence-taking culture, where, as she puts it, we live ‘in constant fear of disrespecting others and being disrespected ourselves’. Social media, you might well think, monetises this fear, producing engagement through enragement and facilitating the fatuous exchange of diss and counter-diss. So much so that, on reading this superb book, I yearned to exchange our mimsy, anti-intellectual 21st-century mire of weaponised feelings, narcissistically confected offence, man-baby idiocy and unedifying celebrity beef for ancient Athens. There, at least if Plato’s dialogues are anything to go by, unconstrained inquiry predicated on mutual respect and the fearless debunking of cherished norms and prejudices was – imagine! – valued.