Seven ordinary minutes that are really old questions in disguise

People think philosophy lives in seminar rooms. Most of it lives in the half hour before lunch. Here are a few places I have caught an ancient question wearing ordinary clothes.

The kettle. You flick it on, and for ninety seconds you are certain it will boil, because it always has. You have never once seen a reason it must. That gap, between what has always happened and what has to happen, kept David Hume awake, and it should keep the rest of us mildly uneasy. We call the next ninety seconds the future and act as though we have already been there.

The group chat. Someone says a thing you half agree with, and you feel the pull to round it up to full agreement or down to none. The hard discipline, older than the chat and older than the printing press, is to hold a view at the exact strength the evidence allows and not a notch stronger. Almost nobody manages it. I try, and I lose arguments I could have won by simply being louder.

The queue. You will not push in, though you could, though the person behind would not stop you. Not fear, usually. Something quieter: a sense that the queue only works because everyone agrees to treat a line of strangers as binding. You are keeping a promise nobody asked you to make. Rather a lot of ink has been spilled on why we do that.

The second biscuit. You decided, clearly, this morning, not to. Here is your hand. The Greeks had a word for it, akrasia, acting against your own better judgement, and the honest part is that naming it does not stop the hand.

The old photograph. It is you at seven, and not one atom you had then is still in you now. Different cells, different opinions, a different favourite colour. In what sense is it you. The ship gets rebuilt plank by plank and we keep calling it the same ship, and we pull the same trick on ourselves every morning in the mirror.

The apology you rehearse. You are sorry, and you are also arranging the words so the other person thinks well of you, and you cannot fully prise the two apart even inside your own head. Whether a good act stays good when a selfish motive is folded into it is not a settled matter. I have decided to apologise anyway and let the philosophers bill me later.

The light left on. You climb back up the stairs to turn it off, in an empty house, saving an amount too small to name. You are not doing it for the money. You are doing it because of the sort of person switching it off makes you, which is an entire theory of ethics smuggled onto a dark landing.

None of this is meant to settle anything. That is rather the point. The questions that last are the ones that keep turning up in the hall, in the kitchen, at the foot of the stairs, refusing to be answered and refusing to leave. I find that more comforting than I probably should.

One of those old questions arrives with dessert in Nobody Gets the Whole Cake: a cake reaches a crowded table, and equal slices only sound fair until you ask who baked it.