ABSTRACT
Policy answers, which are given to perceived problems, are often muddled because they have not addressed questions that philosophers from time immemorial have been asking. It is the job of philosophy to scratch beneath the surface of ‘agreed meanings’ – the ‘self-evidently true’ pronouncements – and to show that life is much more complicated than is assumed. Indeed, as the philosopher Wittgenstein explained, ‘My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: 1.464).
