Doctor Julian Smith gazes in wonder as he stands at the very summit of Snowdon, having spent all morning driving to Llanberis and all afternoon clambering up the scree and unmarked pathways to get here. He breathes deeply of the clear, pure air.

The late sunlight angles across Snowdonia. Doctor Smith observes its peaks turning golden while gently undulating clouds create shadows that float and scud over the lush valleys and hillsides below, and the dark granite of the mountainside opposite glistens  magically.

The young doctor's mouth hangs open. He stands a statue, awe-struck, a witness to the glory of a scene that stretches as far as he can see.

But in his mind there is another glory - the glory of his own triumph. For only this morning he received news, at last, of his doctorate - a PhD in Philosophy. He thinks again of the massive effort he had put into his doctoral thesis - The Empirical Nature of Modern Thought - and how he grappled so hard with the essential epistemological problem of distinguishing justified opinion from belief, and how applying the rigour of deductive reasoning had so nearly broken him. Those months and months of lonely effort! But he’d done it. And there were even one or two publishers (admittedly very specialist ones) who were showing interest. Yes - he’d stuck to his guns. He believed in Locke’s empiricism - Locke’s demand that only through the rigour of using the five senses could true knowledge come. Observation, measurement, clear thinking. How he’d fought with his supervisor. Silly man, well the bloke is really a hippy. Don’t know why the university keeps him. He’d almost made Julian give up, insisting empiricism wasn’t enough, that real knowledge and thought was more than that. But despite him, Julian had stayed true to his principles, first principles at that, and the awarding team had not only accepted his paper but had said some rather nice things about it. And now the award was his. Philosophy won't get you a job, his mum and dad had told him. Now look. His future in academia is secure. He has his doctorate and soon he will have his first book!

And just look at this view! His first time out of doors for what seems like years.  He’d come here today on impulse - unusual for him - but what the heck! He needed to get away from his bedsit and the claustrophobia of that university town. And he wanted to celebrate alone - he’d achieved it all by himself, hadn’t he? And he is really alone. The little mountain railway has taken away the last of the day-trippers and the cafe has seen off the rearmost of the ramblers. Here, now, it is just Julian and this wondrous vista.

The light begins to fade. The last rays of the sun radiate weakly from behind a peak way over there to the west. Its shadows and those of the other peaks shift towards him. He watches them - huge dark fingers growing over the landscape. Oh, what beauty! Plato talks of forms - of perfect forms - that cannot exist on earth but only in some abstract otherworld. But oh! What could be more perfect than this? For here, now, Julian feels the very pulse of the universe, where time is irrelevant. He looks down at the darkening valleys below. There must have walked some of the earliest humans; over there must have witnessed the age of the dinosaurs; there has seen treacly-skinned creatures emerging from the nutritious soup of the primeval sea, where tiny amoeba-like single cells somehow learnt to divide and become plants or animals. And here I am, thinks Julian - in the midst of these craggy mountains that have existed for millennia, a tiny figure on the top of this one peak - an insignificant figure on the top of a mountain that is itself insignificant in a vast universe, and yet, paradoxically, both I and this mountain are simultaneously as significant as that universe because we are an essential part of it. It could not be if we were not. We are part of the thrumming inexplicable wonder that is this world and its cosmos. Oh! But where do these thoughts come from? Am I thinking metaphysically? What ontology is this? Am I having feelings that can’t be explained? I’m disproving all that empirical stuff in my thesis! For this awareness is taking my mind beyond reason, beyond the senses. Oh no! Could my thesis supervisor have been right all along, with his boot-cut Levis and his paisley shirts?

The sun at last slips beneath some horizon that exists beyond this mountain range. The luminescence around the great peaks in front of him dims. Behind, to the east, the darkness of night has already taken hold. Now the sky has become black and tonight there is no moon. “Bugger!” says Julian, aloud. “How do I get back down in the dark? And I forgot to bring a torch!” 

The stars above him sparkle and pulse coldly and, well, to be honest, they don’t give Julian or his situation even a septillionth of a second's thought. And also, as each of us here knows, not all of the writings and clever ideas of Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Hume, Russell and Roland Barthes combined will help him in this situation.