Why study things?

This is the pilgrimage medal I had after I went to Santiago in 1995. It’s just the ordinary cheap, lead model they sell in the tourist shops there, nothing special at all, but it was simply, if you like, my memento mori of the expedition.

It’s a scallop shell. The scallop shell has traditionally been the symbol of St James because it is a native of Galicia, which is the region of Spain where Santiago de Compostela is, and supposedly, according to legend, when his body was found it was surrounded by scallop shells, and this is therefore ever since been the symbol of the saint.

So you will not just see the scallop as an individual symbol, but if you look at churches, if you look at hospices, if you look at other buildings connected with St James, they all have somewhere on them the scallop shell because it is the symbol of the saint.

If the chain wasn’t broken I’d still wear it round my neck all the time and it serves to remind me of something I did and I would like to do again eventually.

If I was a medieval pilgrim, I’d have worn it in my hat, and you would have seen a wonderful selection of people who’d been to all the major shrines, who had a selection of these in their hats, so you’d have Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Rome – they all had their own symbols. I mean, I suppose, if you like, the modern equivalent is those t-shirts which say ‘I’ve been to London’.

Art history doesn’t just concentrate on paintings or sculpture or on valuable objects, it also concentrates on the more mundane phenomenons of material culture, of which this is an example.

Even though there are millions of these in the world, it still has meaning because it has meaning for me in particular, because it is particular to me, but also if someone else has one of their own, it will mean something to them. But at the same time, as a symbol, it means something to everyone, so when anyone looks at one of these they will recognise the symbol and understand what it means. So it has a much wider meaning than just for me, myself.

This is a Greek vase that was made in Athens around 520/510 bce, so the very end of the sixth century. I find it particularly interesting, partly because of the mythological scene that’s represented on the front of it, which shows Herakles fighting with the mythical sea monster, the Triton. And it’s very difficult to untangle their bodies, but you can see that Triton has got a naked upper-half of his body, he’s got a black beard and then fishy scales. And Herakles is dressed in a lion skin, his usual attribute. And so it’s a very interesting mythological representation. They actually have their names written above them. So Triton here has got this fixed stare as he is getting crushed, and then this coiling fishy tail with scales on it that are really beautifully incised and overlapping. And then Herakles is up here. You can’t really see his facial features. And then on either side you’ve got these very static female figures, who are gesturing with their hands towards the battle that’s happening. So this vase tells us a really interesting story about changing attitudes to ancient artefacts. Now, it was collected in the nineteenth century, and at that time people didn’t really appreciate having fragmentary, broken antiquities, so it was stuck together and the cracks were painted over, so it actually looked like a complete beautiful, untouched vase. In more recent times, there’s been a turn towards uncovering these unsympathetic restorations, and revealing more of the actual biography of the vase and how it’s been broken and put together over time. So that’s why this vase appears to be in what you might describe as a fragmentary state because the restoration has been removed by conservators in the museum. Of all the Greek vases in the Fitzwilliam galleries, this is one of the ones that interests me the most because you can track bits of its biography from looking at its material and how it appears to us today.

My object is Jeremy Bentham, who was the founder of Utilitarianism – the principle of maximising happiness for the greatest number of people a great movement in philosophy – and bizarrely he became an auto-icon after his death.

His body was dissected in public; a lecture was delivered over his opened body by his friend who was a doctor, who undertook to enact the terms of the will. His head was preserved and mummified, unfortunately not very successfully, and it wasn’t really recognisable so it has been replaced by a wax head. And then the skeleton was reconstructed and dressed with Bentham’s own clothes, and he was put into a pose that’s supposed to be the kind of pose that he was in when he was thinking in the process of writing. And he’s there with his favourite walking stick and his glasses.

Jeremy Bentham is really unusual in that he gave explicit consent in his will, in fact he demanded in his will, that he should be put on display like this. But usually when bodies and body parts appear in museums, it’s not even with implicit consent.

So, for instance, we look at the case of the Torres Strait islanders, whose skulls and jawbones were until recently owned by the Natural History Museum. These were there not with the consent of the people who died, and modern-day descendants of these islanders are absolutely explicit that these objects are sacred, and they have actually campaigned to have them returned to the ancestral islands where they are going to be treated with the appropriate respect.

As a philosopher, I’m really interested in the issues that arise about the ownership and display of not just body parts but objects generally in museums, because there’s a whole underlying theoretical issue about: what are museums for; whose rights should prevail in questions where there’s a conflict of rights? The people who maybe rightfully own the objects, the nations from which the objects originated, or perhaps nobody should be looking at body parts? These are really philosophical questions, moral questions, about how we should live and how we should treat the dead, how we should respect objects, how we should weigh the wishes of the dead against the wishes of the living.