Street sages prised from their shells

THINK how difficult it must be to launch a magazine with the daring

aim of making philosophy more accessible to the general public. But this

miracle has been quite astonishgly achieved by Eileen Reid, daughter of

Jimmy Reid. In her magazine The Oyster Club, now in its fifth number and

second year, contributors have ranged from Roger Scruton and Anthony

O'Hear to Piers Benn, the philosopher nephew of Tony Benn, Susan

Flockhart, currently Scottish news editor of The Big Issue, and Bruce

Charleton, an affable Geordie doctor who writes like a dream on medical

ethics.

As the British, in particular, tend to think of intellectuals as being

rather fishy, the bright cover usually depicts something to do with

shell-fish, boats or the sea. In the world of glossy magazine publishing

it is said that cover-lines to do with sex are currently losing reader

appeal. Perhaps they should try the sort of article plugged on the front

of The Oyster Club's current number: Is it reasonable to be rational? As

an opinionated housewife who has been totally unreasonable and

irrational for years, I, for one, could scarcely wait to find out.

Brilliant editors spring from the most unlikely places. Like Eileen

Reid they somehow know how to electrify a magazine or newspaper in the

way a good host or hostess instinctively throws a lively party, whether

they have much money or not. The Oyster Club, now the most chic popular

philosophy magazine in Europe, is put out on a budget of #100 per issue

from the Scottish Philosophical Society and, of course, no pay for the

editor.

The current circulation of the magazine is 500. This is not a figure

likely to keep Rupert Murdoch awake at night, but it's pretty good for a

new philosophy magazine. It says something about Scotland's continuing

devotion to philosophy that even in these straitened times, the Saltire

Society in Edinburgh has just commissioned a statue of David Hume from

the young Paisley sculptor, Alexander Stoddart, also a contributor on

aesthetics to Eileen Reid's magazine.

Like many women for whom ordinary family life is still a golden ideal,

Eileen Reid, 34, was catapulted into lone parenthood against her will.

Coming from a family background strong and warm enough to have straddled

in its time both Catholicism and Communism, it is no surprise that her

research subject of the moment is Original Sin and Political Authority.

Agonising over the contents of a supermarket basket while juggling

child care, is not the calmest situation in which to have a stab at

philosophical issues. Currently, she has a part-time job teaching

political philosophy at Glasgow University. When that folds in

September, she has no idea how money or work will subsequently pan out.

Devotion to her father, Jimmy, led her to philosophy in the first

place: ''Not because he was a trained philosopher, but because he is a

good man and a deep thinker, always trying to work things out and

discussing them without acrimony at home in the way people who are

clever but not very high up in society usually tried to do.''

While child-minding for a living in 1992, the idea of starting a

magazine to make philosophy more accessible to the general public

suddenly came to her. People who are intrested in philosophy sometimes

find children a stimulus. Young children see the world with very few

preconceptions. They see life stripped down to some of the basic

questions that highly original philosophers have taken as their raw

material for centuries: What Is Time? What Are Numbers? Why Is One Thing

I Do Right And Another Wrong? Children who spin round and round to

deliberately make themselves dizzy have always struck me as philosophers

in the making. They are already puzzled by another hoary old question:

Is My Brain The Same As My Mind?

Eileen Reid felt that ''it should be possible for extremely good

skilled philosophers to write and write well for some kind of magazine

so that complicated ideas could be put over to the public at large.''

She is keen to emphasise that writing well for the public is two-way

traffic as far as professional philosophers are concerned.

''It puts them on a spot as well. They have to go back to the roots of

a philosophical problem, think about it again and again and then write

-- without distortion -- to achieve a kind of transparecny of

communication which requires enormous intellectual effort.''

Nowadays, this certainly puts mdoern French obfuscators like Derrida

in their place. ''The British tradition in philosophy has been to write

clearly. Look at Hume -- a wonderful man who writes with passion and

clarity and profundity. The modern French notion that to be really

brilliant you have to be incomprehensible is crazy.'' In digging up a

title for the magazine Eileen had the urge to get away from all the

trendy one-word stuff such as ''forum'' or ''Discourse'' -- that sort of

thing.

Some time later, she discovered that in eighteenth-century Edinburgh

there had been an Oyster Club, a dining club run by no less than Adam

Smith to discuss general philosophical ideas with people such as Joseph

Black the chemist. James Hutton the geologist and Robert Adam the

architect. Today she sees her magazine as a new way of ''expanding and

honouring the philosophical spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment''.

''Getting philosophy out of the universities,'' as Eileen puts it, is

not a new idea. Among the greatest philosophers, it is a subject which

has always swung between the universities and the market-place. Look at

the life of Socrates, for example. In Aristophanes' play, The Clouds,

Socrates was ridiculed as hanging up in a basket in his ''thinking

shop'' where the air was thinner. That was life in the ivory tower. But

Socrates, attempting to disprove himself the wisest man in Athens, also

went out among the people. By pretending to be ignorant and skilfully

questioning them, he was able to draw out the great wisdom which lay

dormant and for which they had hitherto had no words.

NEEDLESS to say, Socrates's mother was a midwife and his father a

sculptor -- two callings which with professional calm and precision

release beings already formed and waiting to be formed. Among Glasgow's

philosophical midwives, Eileen Reid cites her colleague. Catherine

McCall who is also trying to open philosophy back into the community.

''She is taking it out to schools and prisons and tries to encourage

people to develop philosophical skills themselves.''

But why, I asked her, should ordinary peoiple need philosophical

skills?

Nowadays, Eileen Reid feels it is all to do with political failure.

''People need to be able to discuss ideas logically again, without

personal or class acrimony and with respect for other people's opinions

-- with the calm intensity of the philosopher, in fact. One big question

we all need to discuss once more in Britain is ''What Inequalities Are

Unjust?''

It is always said that philosophers take hold of the public

imagination during periods of political chaos or darkness -- something

to do with ''the owl of Minerva taking wing with the falling of dusk.''

* The Oyster Club (#1) is on sale at all branches of John Smith

Booksellers, Glasgow. By post, it costs #1 (plus 50p postage and

packing) from: The Oyster Club, Department of Philosophy, University of

Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ.