On Friday I ran three seminars as part of a philosophy conference for fourteen-year-olds run by the University of Sheffield’s Philosophy in the City outreach program. The day was based around Eric Olson’s views on personal identity. This became overbearing, because the day was planned, at Olson’s insistence, around his views alone: all three seminars were about animalism, a view almost no-one else agrees with, and the students felt they had nothing they could contrast it with. Because they didn’t.

It was a problem of competing interests. The university wanted to show that research produced by one of its academics was having a real ‘impact’ on the community. Post-graduate students from the university who actually organised the day told the students they were interested in their flourishing as human beings.