A no foolin' philosophy link list (now with more videos)

A New Yorker article in which Jill Lepore applies some of the insights of Michael Lynch and Barbara Shapiro.

Joe Gelonesi interviews Noam Chomsky on Aussie radio.

Viggo Mortensen will read Albert Camus' 'The Human Crisis' (part of the festivities commemorating the 70th anniversary of Camus' visit to New York). Robert Zaretsky on NY's Camus festival.

Zadie Smith on Schopenhauer. I've heard that Tolstoy was into Schopenhauer while writing Anna Karenina. Here's a Schopenhauerian passage from that novel (Rosamund Bartlett's translation):

[Vronsky] soon began to feel that the fulfilment of his desires had given him no more than a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he had been expecting. This fulfilment had shown him the error people invariably make when they imagine happiness to be the fulfilment of desires. In the initial period after joining his life to hers and putting on civilian clothes, he experienced the full delights of freedom in general, which he had not known before, and also the freedom of love, and he was content, but not for long. He soon felt desires for desires, and tedium arising in his soul. Independent of his will, he began grasping at every passing whim, perceiving it as a desire and a purpose. (Oxford University Press, trans. Rosamund Bartlett [2014], p. 467)

Christopher Donohue: 'Herbert Spencer on Instinct and Intelligence: The Background of the “Cambridge Mind”'.

Dwight Garner reviews a new English translation of Carlo Rovelli's physics book. Rovelli was interviewed at Philosophy Bites last November. Rovelli's conversation with Lee Smolin in 2012. And here's Rovelli in 2014 on philosophy's relevance (ht Wayne Myrvold).

At the Edge, Janna Levin on gravitational waves. Also at the Edge, Rebecca Goldstein on 'pursuing a coherent human life' and an entry on the late Verena Huber-Dyson.

At the LARB, Matthew Stanley reviews Marcelo Gleiser's The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning; Daniel Hirschman reviews Harry Frankfurt's On Inequality; and Robert L. Kehoe III reviews Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. Finally, Aurelian Craiutu on Michael Oakeshott's Notebooks, 1922-1986.

A translation of a 1969 conversation with Adorno from Der Spiegel.


A bio of Angela Davis by Miranda Bain at The Heroine Collective.

'Lev Shestov.: Russia's answer to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche' by Sergei Tseytlin.

Mike Rottmann: 'Reestablishing Philosophy in a Destroyed Country: Karl Löwith’s Return to Germany'.

Stephen Cowley summarizes the introduction to Pierre Osmo's French translation of Rudolf Haym's Hegel and his Time. (German bio for Haym) Here's a blurb on Haym's book from an 1857 issue of The Christian Examiner.

Interesting site on Caroline Schelling. The project was NEH-funded and seems to have run approx. from 2005 till 2007.

'Kant gives love advice to a heartbroken young woman (1791)'.

Cambridge University Press has released a collection of Onora O'Neill's essays on Kant.

In the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature, Theodore Ziolkowski has a brief item called 'Philosophers into Fiction', in which he documents fictional treatments of philosophers (esp. Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Both Pea Soup and (more recently) Daily Nous have threads on philosophers in fiction (to which I contributed under my tag 'praymont'). Here's another instance: Andre Malraux's novel Man's Fate includes a character based on Bernard Groethuysen (according to p. 292 of a piece by Daniel Gordon in History & Theory 36 [1997]).

From Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), with Karl Johnson as Ludwig and Tilda Swinton as Lady Ottoline Morrell: 


Lady Constance Malleson (Colette), an actress and writer who was romantically involved with Bertrand Russell, wrote a roman à clef which featured Russell, Joad, Lady Ottolline Morrell and others. Here's a decoder key for the novel from John Slater's biographical article (in Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies [1975]): 'In fact the book is a very thinly disguised account of her relationship with Russell. He appears as Don Gregorio del Orellano,a Cambridge astronomer;... Lady Ottoline is Magdalena, the Marquesa de Santa Segunda; C.E.M. Joad is Owen West; Dora Black, Russell's second wife, is Gertrude West; T. S. Eliot is T. C. Maynard; Clifford Allen is Jevons; and Maurice Elvey, a director of silent pictures in whose [film] Hindle Wakes Colette starred, ... is Marcus Beazely.'

Julie Crawford reviews Danielle Dutton's novel Margaret the First, which is based on the life of Margaret Cavendish; Dutton's novel is also reviewed by Sian Norris and by Natalie Helberg. Dutton interviewed.

More about Cavendish: Lara Dodds on Virginia Woolf's criticism of Cavendish's style; Woolf wrote about Cavendish in A Room of One's Own and in The Common Reader; and Lisa Sarasohn's review (pdf) of Anna Battigelli's 1998 book, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (also reviewed here).

Interview with Luc Foisneau, who directed the publication of the Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle.

Gary Wills reviews Robin Lane Fox's Augustine: Conversions to Confessions. Fox replies, and so does Wills.

Paul E. Meehl's videos on philosophical psychology.

'Kenneth Garden, Associate Professor at Tufts University, reexamines al-Ghazali’s work from an historical hermeneutical [stance] in The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2014)'.

Last 12 minutes of Jarman's Tempest (1979), with a performance by Elisabeth Welch:

Philosophers reading (and being read in) WWI lit

Here's another philosopher who was a soldier in WWI: Etienne Gilson, who was taken prisoner early in the Battle of Verdun (in February, 1916). Earlier, while on leave from the front, Gilson managed to put together a journal publication.

It's interesting to see how many veterans were critical of the war memoirs and novels that started appearing in the 1920s (esp. in 1929). I've noted Luce's public criticism in a Belfast sermon, which seems to have been aimed chiefly at Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That. Graves' book also drew the ire of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who meticulously documented the book's inaccuracies in Sassoon's copy of it. 

Wittgenstein was mildly critical of R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End (1928). According to M. O'C. Drury, Wittgenstein read the play in 1936. Drury quotes Wittgenstein as follows:

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them. I couldn't understand the humour in Journey's End. But I wouldn't want to joke about a situation like that. (M. O'C. Drury, 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', Ch. VI in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981], p. 144)

An early WWI text (1919) was Arthur Graeme West's Diary of a Dead Officer. West was killed on the front in 1917. His diary was edited for publication by his friend, the pacifist and philosopher C. E. M. Joad. There are references to Bertrand Russell in West's Diary (pp. 50-57) . West had been reading Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship' and Justice in War Time. In West, one sees the full disenchantment that is dramatized in many WWI books -- initially a religious patriot who wanted to serve King and country, West became an atheist and seemed on the point of refusing to fight any longer when he was killed by a sniper.

May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair

Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern'.

While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction. Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement'. Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

Joad and Stebbing

I know of two books devoted to Joad. There's Cyril Joad by Geoffrey Thomas (1992) and Radio Philosopher: The Radical Life of Cyril Joad by Tony Judge (2012).

Judge says that Joad and L. Susan Stebbing were friends who lived near each other in Hampstead.  Stebbing was an analytic philosopher who published an influential logic text and a critique of James Jeans and Arthur Eddington (Philosophy and the Physicists).  Her name should (but doesn't) appear in the Projected Table of Contents for the SEP.  Palgrave Macmillan will be publishing a book about Stebbing (by Siobhan Chapman).

Her friendship with Joad must have been interesting.  In my other posts about Joad, I've linked to several of his on-line bio's, from which it's evident that he was a sexist whose views of women were generally disapproved of even in his own day.  And now here's Susan Stebbing, a woman who was smarter than him and who didn't hesitate to let him know it.  She was quite scathing in print about Joad's works.  For instance, in 1926, Stebbing had this to say of Joad's Thrasymachus, or The Future of Morals:

It is an extremely clever and extremely superficial speech, as its title would suggest. Mr. Joad mistakes diatribe for argument, and appeals throughout to the herd's love of abuse of the forces that are. It is full of an inverted sentimentality that makes clear thinking impossible, and of jokes that merely obscure the issue. (Susan Stebbing, 'English Books', Philosophy [then called the Journal of Philosophical Studies], v. 1 [1926]: pp. 90-93)

In my previous post, I noted that Joad's reviewers tended to be quite complimentary of his prose.  Not Stebbing.  In a symposium at the Aristotelian Society in 1929, Stebbing said of Joad: 'As we shall see, his use of language is very inexact; hence, his statements are confused in the extreme.'

Joad felt the sting of these remarks, as is evident from his review of a volume that had been published in memory of Stebbing about five years after her death.  The review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of February 26, 1949 (on p. 141).  At that time, the authors of reviews in the TLS were generally not named, but in the TLS's archives Joad is identified as the author of the review.  In it, he says,

Professor Stebbing had an acid manner and a biting tongue. She possessed in an outstanding degree the power to make a person both look and feel foolish ... An undue tartness was the defect of Professor Stebbing's controversial method, but if it was a fault, it was a fault on the right side, and it was more than counterbalanced by her intellectual virtues.

He felt the sting but still expressed respect for her intellect.

Joad as philosophical journalist and entertainer

The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand devotes a chapter to Joad in Conversations in Bloomsbury, a collection of Anand's reminiscences about his student days in London (which includes four chapters on T. S. Eliot).  Anand met Joad in a class at Birkbeck College, after which the two had lunch together.  Impressed by the ensuing philosophical conversation, Anand reports that one of his friend's, Nikhil Sen, dismissed Joad as a  'good philosophical journalist' who 'says nothing very original.' (pp. 57-8).

This seems to have been the consensus reached by many of Joad's contemporaries.  Indeed, in his obituary in the Times of London (April 10, 1953), we are told that Joad 'had no interesting contribution to make as a philosopher.'  He is then characterized as an 'author, university teacher, controversialist, and entertainer'.

His lack of originality is borne out by the two main on-line encyclopedias of philosophy (the SEP and the IEP), in which the only discussion of Joad's views appears in Paisley Livingston's entry on the 'History of the Ontology of Art'.  (Joad's works are cited, though, in a number of entries.)

Joad does seem to have excelled as a philosophical journalist.  His expository gifts were noted by reviewers as diverse as Michael Oakeshott, Cyril Connolly, W. R. Inge, A. C. Ewing, Evelyn Underhill, H. L. Mencken, and even Bertrand Russell (who otherwise had only contempt for Joad).

One of Joad's virtues was his interest in non-western philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, about which he wrote a popular book.  According to one bio, 

Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936) assisted by Girija Mookerjee.

So, as a philosophical journalist Joad covered more than just his own home turf.  He opened Britons' eyes to another philosophical tradition.  And, at a time when Churchill was expressing his wretched views about Mahatma Gandhi, Joad published 'The Authority of Detachment and Moral Force: Mohandas Gandhi'.  This paper was included in a volume that Radharkrishnan edited in 1939, Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work.

Joad's coverage of philosophy was certainly biased -- he was a Platonist about pretty much everything -- but it helped some very bright individuals to find their way into philosophy.  In his autobiography, Antony Flew (e.g.) credits Joad's books as having spurred his philosophical development.  Also, in his 'Intellectual Autobiography', P. F. Strawson says that he first experienced the 'intellectual pull' of philosophy partly by way of 'some popular books on philosophy (notably by the not contemptible C. E. M. Joad)' (Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, p. xvii).

Joad and the law

I gave a rough outline of Joad's life but didn't know that one of his books, Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics, was quoted in the 1988 Supreme Court case that removed Canada's old abortion law (R v. Morgentaler). Siris drew attention to this connection.

Joad himself was in court more than once. His public downfall eventuated from his fare evasion on a train. In that case, Joad initially entered a plea of 'guilty' but then tried to defend his action by explaining how the 'fare evasion' was the result of an honest mistake. The magistrate declared that Joad's explanation had the effect of changing his plea to 'not guilty'. This prompted another hearing at which Joad supplied more half-hearted rationales, culminating in his conviction.

I learned some of these details from the excellent Times of London archive (which is behind a paywall). From the same source I discovered that Joad was once taken to court for libel. The defamatory statements appeared in Joad's Guide to Modern Wickedness (1st ed., 1939) -- given the above caricature of Joad, I wonder if the Guide was a how-to. According to the Times edition of July 29, 1939 (p. 3), Rev. E. L. Macassey, vicar of Mapledurham, went to court for damages from Joad and his publisher, Faber & Faber (and from the printers). The vicar's ire had been raised by material in Chapter 3 ('Religion'), in which Joad supposedly quoted from a sermon that had been preached at 'his local church'. In the book, Joad named neither the vicar nor the church but did provide enough information for people in the Mapledurham area to identify the vicar. According to the Times' record of the case, the defamatory passages included 'extremely objectionable references to the vicar ..., references that no clergyman could allow to pass unchallenged.' No further specification of the libelous statements is given. Joad and Faber agreed to apologize to the vicar and pay him £250 (which the vicar gave to charity). Also, they agreed to withdraw unsold copies of the book and remove the offending passages before the book was reprinted. It was reprinted in the early 1940's.

Unfortunately, none of the editions of his Guide to Modern Wickedness appear to be on-line. Some of Joad's other works are in the wonderful Internet Archive.

Joe Strummer would have been 60 on Aug. 21.

Joad of Joad Hall

Last Friday, Nigeness posted on Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953), an Englishman who taught philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London.  Nigeness paints an unflattering picture of Joad.  I decided to dig up some more info on the man.

Joad finished his education at Oxford in 1914 -- he was a John Locke Scholar in Mental Philosophy at Oxford in that year -- after which he worked as a civil servant until 1930.  According to Jason Tomes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Joad was exempt from military service in WWI due to his position as a senior civil servant.  In 1930, he became the head of the philosophy department at Birkbeck College in the University of London "and ran it for or 23 years -- but he was never made a professor." (H/t to Man Without Qualities for that last link.)  A. J. Ayer put this point in stronger terms in his autobiography (Part of my Life, p. 302):  'He [Joad] taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, where they refused to make him a professor, though he allowed himself to be called so' (emphasis added).  In fact, Joad was 'called so' more than pretty much anybody else of his time.  The title 'Professor' came to be so indissolubly fused to his surname that Peter Clarke once wrote, 'Like Dr Johnson, Colonel House, or Professor Joad, he [Gladstone] has laid peculiar claim from beyond the grave to a conventional style of address' (London Review of Books [April 17, 1980]).  Joad's actual title at Birkbeck was 'Reader in Philosophy'; according to Tomes, 'the University gave him a DLitt degree in 1936 and promoted him to reader in 1945.'

Joad was praised mainly as a great teacher and popularizer rather than as an original philosopher or scholar.  He rose to fame in the UK as a founding member of the The Brains Trust, a radio program on the BBC. Here's a clip from the BBC archives (April 28, 1942) in which Joad, Julian Huxley and others discuss the establishment of a public, national health service (and the meaning of 'allergy'). Joad begins speaking at 1.46 and again at 5.06 and at 6.31. On this show he became famous for prefacing his comments with the phrase, 'It all depends on what you mean by ....'

Before achieving his fame on the radio, Joad achieved infamy.  He was vilified by many of his contemporaries for his opposition to conscription in WWI and, later, for his role in the infamous Oxford Union debate on February 9, 1933, where -- about ten days after Hitler had become the German Chancellor -- Joad defended the proposition, 'That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.'  His role in the debate (as a guest speaker) earned him the enmity of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill referred to the 1933 resolution twice in The Second World War, Volume 1: The Gathering Storm.  On p. 77, Churchill wrote, 'In 1933 the students of the Oxford Union, under the inspiration of a Mr. Joad, passed their ever-shameful resolution, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."'  'Mr. Joad' -- he was no professor in Churchill's eyes.  Indeed, according to Churchill, Joad's resolution influenced Great Britain's enemies:

Mussolini, like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman .... Lord Lloyd, who was on friendly terms with him [Mussolini], noted how he had been struck by the Joad resolution of the Oxford undergraduates in 1933. (p. 150)

The Daily Express characterized the debate's outcome in these ridiculous terms:  'There is no question but that the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success in the publicity that has followed this victory.'

Joad had held pacifist views since before WWI.  Under the influence of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw (among others), he joined the Fabian Society in 1912.  Like Shaw and Bertrand Russell, Joad opposed the UK's involvement in WWI.

Certainly Joad was not afraid to adopt unpopular positions (he wrote some stinging critiques of Christianity).  According to the Spartacus bio at the previous link, he supported the suffragists.  Unfortunately, as is noted in that same bio, he became a horrible sexist.  The Spartacus bio contains the following quotation from  Joad's 1932 autobiography:

I started my adult life, as I have recounted, with such high hopes of women, that the process of disillusionment has left a bitterness behind. If I was never sentimental enough to expect women to be soul mates, at least I thought to treat them as intellectual equals. It was a shock to find that the equality had been imposed by myself upon unequals who resented it. If only women could have remained at the silent-film stage, all would have been well; but the invention of talking has been as disastrous in women as it has in the cinema.

That's what a supposedly progressive public figure wrote in 1932.  Not surprisingly, Joad doesn't seem to have established any stable relationships with women.  He married in 1915 and left his wife in 1921.  He had three children from that marriage (two daughters and a son) but wasn't on speaking terms with any of them later in life.

Joad garnered little respect from the most prominent British philosophers of the day. Bertrand Russell disliked Joad and accused him of plagiarism.  I'm not sure of the details connected with this charge, but according to an anecdote that Ayer recounts (Part of my Life, p. 302), when Russell was asked to review a book by Joad, Russell replied, 'Modesty forbids.'

Joad had some contact with the Inklings in the early 1940's.  He attended an Inklings meeting in 1943.  He shows up in two of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters from that year.  In a letter to his son, Christopher, dated October 25, Tolkien said, 'Tomorrow night I am going to hobnob, chez Lewis, with Joad of Joad Hall.'  I was thinking of starting that joke ('Joad Hall') until I saw that Tolkien beat me to it.  (Actually, Tolkien attributes the joke to an unidentified author.)  Tolkien elaborated on the joke in a subsequent letter (Oct. 27) to Christopher, which is summarized at the Tolkien Gateway as follows:

Tolkien said that except for his face Joad was very like a toad, and in character closely resembled Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. He found him intelligent, kindly, and they agreed on many fundamental points. Joad had been in Russia and loathed it.

Perhaps it was Joad's trip to the Soviet Union in 1930 that initiated the long process in which he dropped many of his earlier beliefs.  While he strongly opposed Hitler and Mussolini, Joad was still a pacifist at the start of WWII.  However, according to Tomes in the ODNB (linked above), Joad had abandoned his pacifism by May, 1940, by which time he had concluded that war was necessary in order to save civilization.

Another major change in Joad's beliefs concerned religion.  By the time he debated C. S. Lewis at the Oxford Socratic Club on January 24, 1944, Joad had become a theist but not a Christian.  He seems to have been influenced by Lewis, though, as is evident from a paper by Joel D. Heck (here's the pdf), to the point where Joad joined the Church of England near the end of his life.  In 1952, he published his last book, The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy.

Joad was known for his passionate debates.  His exchange with Lewis in 1944 attracted more than twice as many spectators as the average Socratic Club debate.  According to Joad's New York Times obituary (April 10, 1953), he returned to the Oxford Union for a debate with Randolph Churchill in 1950.  Here's the resolution that Joad defended: 'That this House regrets the influence exercised by the US, as the dominant power among the democratic nations.'  In this debate, Joad said (I quote from the NY Times obit), 'Britain is tied to the wheels of the American chariot -- a chariot leading us to Hell.'  According to Time Magazine's coverage, Joad added, 'Money is the sole American standard of value.'  Joad had visited the United States exactly once.  It was at this debate that R. Churchill referred to Joad as 'a third-class Socrates.'

Joad's indiscretions caught up with him after WWII.  He boasted publicly that he regularly rode trains without paying for his tickets.  He was caught doing so in 1948.  The BBC responded by firing him.  No more Brains Trust for Joad.  He returned to infamy.

What a strange character.  He could easily have afforded to pay for his rail trips.  His habit of not doing so reminds me of rich people who shoplift, except that they tend not to make public declarations of their kleptomania.  It's as if Joad wanted to be caught and discredited.  Why? Did he feel guilty about something?

(More about Joad in a subsequent post.)