Like a lot of people, I suspect you’ve had at least one awful experience of philosophy. Maybe there was a party where that seemingly nice man became rabidly angry about misinterpretations of Nietzsche? Perhaps you tried to read Hegel on a summer holiday to discover a single sentence covering an entire page? Or maybe you simply wearied of reading “if and only if”, or prose that looked more like an engineering schematic?

I’ve known all of these, and feel the pain sharply. To be honest, I blame Descartes. He started it, and it wasn’t always that way. 

Philosophy should be relatable, it should be practical, and it should be readable and accessible. But most of all, it ought to be fun.

The Ancient Greeks knew all this. They invented the word philosophy, after all. They thought that it should be an everyday activity, and one that helped you live your life. It wasn’t supposed to be some arcane or pretentious strutting about (in fact, these types were disparagingly called ‘Sophists’). Philosophy needed only to make you think and explore what it means to be human.

Most importantly, anyone could do it, and, I believe, anyone still can do it. You don’t need a beret, a thesaurus, or a library of names to drop to be called a philosopher. All you need is a curiosity beyond the obvious. It needs a reaching for still, quiet moments of reflection – a ‘look again’ and ‘look harder’. So this is why I set up Mini Philosophy.

With each post, I use a minimalist image to represent and explain philosophers and philosophies. I use accessible language, probing questions, stories, examples and modern applications. I hope to bring philosophy back from its labyrinthine prolixity to the living room, coffee house or commute. I aim to make people think.

The Author

Jonny Thomson probably talks about philosophy too much. He’s one of those tedious people who says things like, ‘Actually, that’s not dissimilar to what Camus said’. He likes to think that he’s too self-aware to be pretentious, but he’s seen enough sideways glances and vacant smiles to suspect otherwise.

Jonny lives in Oxfordshire, and has been teaching Philosophy and Religious Studies in Oxford for years. He has a degree in Philosophy from Durham and runs an Instagram account called Mini Philosophy. His posts are the result of his conversations with students, and a masochistic obsession with reading dense philosophy. 

Whilst the principal focus of his work is philosophy, Jonny loves to write about all manner of academic subjects. Under the increasingly strained title of his “Philosophy” blog, he has turned his hand to the origins of life, linguistics, developmental psychology, time travel paradoxes, psychoanalysis and thematic explorations of classic novels and poetry.