Philosophy and travel have been tangled together for centuries. On World Tourism Day, Professor Emily Thomas, who is the Head of our Department of Philosophy, assesses how the two interlink in unexpected and fascinating ways.
Can you summarise your research?
Travel poses philosophical questions. Can meeting unfamiliar peoples tell us anything about human minds? Is it ethical to visit the Great Barrier Reef if its corals are withering? Is travel all about men?
Further, philosophy has affected travel. The philosophy of space encouraged seaside tourism. Ideas about the sublime spurred mountain climbing and caving. Philosophy of science produced travelling scientists like John Ray and Charles Darwin, encouraging sailors on the high seas to collect far-flung rocks, plants, and cryptic objects ‘of strange operation’.
How did you first start to study the relationship between philosophy and travel?
It started as a whim – I kept finding stray references to travel in seventeenth century philosophy books and I wanted to see where those threads led. Before long I realised that travel and philosophy have affected each other in all kinds of ways, and that this is still going on today.
How has travel affected philosophy?
I’ll take one of my favourite seventeenth century examples. Back then, European thinkers widely believed that all people are born with the same ‘innate ideas’: especially ideas of what is moral, and a ‘stamped’ impression of the Christian creator God. English philosopher John Locke disagreed.
During the so-called ‘Age of Discovery’, European travellers brought home en masse reports of foreign customs and beliefs. Locke makes use of them in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, describing cannibalism among peoples in Georgia, the Caribbean and Peru; the immodest sex lives of Turkish saints; and atheism running rampant through China and Thailand.
These (deliberately shocking) examples showed that humans across the planet disagree about ethics and religion. Thus, Locke argues, we are not all born with the same innate ideas.
What philosophical questions are posed by travel today?
Lots! Climate change poses many philosophical questions. Is ‘doom tourism’, the act of racing to see sights such as shrinking glaciers or sinking islands, ethical? How can we travel responsibly?
And travel more broadly poses bigger questions still.
What is it we value in nature – is nature intrinsically valuable, or simply useful to humans? What political stance should we take towards outer space exploration, or colonisation?
Philosophy asks what the world is like, and travel provides us with plenty of world to think about.
