Born in Lagos in 1957 for tax reasons, Jim Hankinson gave evidence at an early age of a naturally enquiring turn of mind, that propensity for asking questions (many of them highly impertinent), which led many observers to predict a career in philosophy, and several others to predict an early death. At school he was widely held to be too clever by half; but these days, by dint of persistent intake of alcohol he is only too clever by about ten per cent.

His undergraduate years were spent at Balliol College, Oxford, where he learned just how difficult Effortless Superiority can be, and that a full-time job is the cultivation of idleness and degeneracy.

Having acquired, to everyone's intense surprise, a First Class degree, he spent a period as a full-time sunbather in Crete before writing a doctoral thesis at King's College, Cambridge, on an area of philosophy so obscure that no-one could effectively examine him on it. On the strength of this he has taught philosophy in Britain, Canada and the USA, always taking care to keep one step ahead of the tax authorities.

A believer in the value of rigorous discipline and self-motivation, he makes a point of working at least five minutes every day (including Wednesdays). His other interests, pressure of work permitting, include European Cinema, beer-brewing, and the development of increasingly complex and improbable fantasies involving Catherine Deneuve.

Historical forces
No-one knows why philosophy started when it did: ambitious bluffers of a Marxist bent could try to account for it in terms of an inexorable dialectic of historical forces, but we wouldn't recommend it.

This and that
Of course, any sensible theory is neither one thing nor the other; and it's generally safe to say something to that effect without fear of having to say just how much of one, or the exact proportion of the other.

The pleasure principal
The Epicureans, named after their founder Epicurus (342-270), held that pleasure was the End and that this consisted in the satisfaction of desires, which was a good start. But then they had to foul things up by arguing that this didn't mean a lot of pleasure was a good thing: rather, one should limit the number of desires one had, so you didn't get left with as many unsatisfied ones...

Kant or can't
One should be very careful about committing oneself in regard to Kant, or indeed any other German philosopher.

Contemplation
It is never out of order to remark, with an air of deep seriousness, that you will have to give the matter more thought. This is a doubly effective technique, in that it both does away with the obligation to say anything that might commit you to something, and also in that it tends to make your adversary feel intellectually inferior.