A couple of weeks ago I jokingly suggested that philosophy might be "the new rock'n'roll". It turns out that the joke is on me. The editor of Philosophy Now magazine has sent me the publicity blurb for a new book by an American professor, James F. Harris. It's title: Philosophy At 33 1/3 rpm.

Rock music, according to Prof. Harris, has "become a vehicle for profound commentary on the human condition. Theories and motifs from major figures in the history of philosophy, theology and literature were refracted and transfigured in this intelligent new popular art form". Thus Joni Mitchell's song, Woodstock, is a defence of Rousseau's view of human nature against Hobbes's", and the Pink Floyd LP, Dark Side Of The Moon "is a systematic exploration of R.D. Laing's radical anti-psychiatry concepts".

I am now writing a rival volume, Philosophy At 45 rpm, in which I shall reveal that Cliff Richard's Living Doll was an expression of the Freudian concept of the life instinct; that I Can't Help Myself by the Four Tops confirmed the deterministic theories of John Stuart Mill and David Hume; and that David Cassidy's How Can I Be Sure, a number one hit in 1972, was an elegant summary of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.