Gillian Rose: Fascism and representation
‘Not in my name’ is and is not in my name In her essay ‘The Future of Auschwitz’, Gillian Rose describes two obvious reactions provoked
Thoughts
Shorter pieces, free and thoughtful.
Socrates On Trial
Socrates is perhaps the most famous philosophical figure of the last 2,500 years. If you are new to philosophy then you will come to see
Is uni worth it? What’s the point of Higher Education?
Undeserving of the light of higher education, no wonder… In 1690 the philosopher John Locke famously wrote ‘The candle that is set up in us,
What did Max Weber mean by the ‘spirit’ of capitalism?
Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works
For Nietzsche, life’s ultimate question was: ‘Does it dance?’
Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts
Personality is not only about who but also where you are
What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?
We need to talk about trees
Trees are now a matter of politics. And we are learning that trees do more than previously thought. They are in fact a source of hope.
Socrates in love: how the ideas of this woman are at the root of Western philosophy
Socrates is a foundational figure of Western philosophy. New research explores if his ideas about truth, love, justice, courage and knowledge were born out of his relationship with a fiercely intelligent woman, Aspasia of Miletus.
Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser
We credit Socrates with the insight that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ and that to ‘know thyself’ is the path to true wisdom.
Humanity and nature are not separate
We must see them as one to fix the climate crisis From transport and housing to food production and fashion, our civilisation is driving climate
Memory in Montréal: on (re)capturing Leonard Cohen
Memory can place us in time and space, can make us feel at home, it can transport us. In doing so memory can hide things we really should see.
The Force of Fiction
How do you relax at the end of a long day? Chances are you do something so commonplace to many of us that we seldom
The Fruit Salad Maker: an interdisciplinary tale
There seems to be a lot of excitement about interdisciplinarity but are “the disciplines” ready to see beyond the primacy of their fields?
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’
According to Ubuntu philosophy, people are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time.
We need a new Romanticism
Neuroscience was part of the dinner conversation in my family, often a prerequisite for truth. Want to talk about art? Not without neuroscience.
The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human
Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories.
This is possibly the most right wing cabinet in modern history
An article the Guardian pulled written by Frankie Boyle