Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential of ‘modern’ philosophers, covering a lot of ground in an impeccably fine-tuned and systematic manner. Offering any kind of summary of his works in a thousand or so words is impossible, so I may err on the side of profligacy on this occasion. But I’m assisted… Read More »
1 An Introduction to Habermas Jurgen Habermas is less discussed than he was even a decade ago, but having written of the relevance of his work for health and health care I am still occasionally asked to give talks on applications of his theories to the health domain. Hence this first in a short series… Read More »
Michael Worton, one time Professor of French Literature and a Vice-Provost at UCL, once told me Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was the most important philosopher of the 20th century. Against that I once heard A J Ayer explain to Malcolm Muggeridge live on TV that Heidegger misused the verb ‘to be’. Maybe the truth is somewhere… Read More »
I’m reading a book on the working habits and outputs of the lately deceased David Hockney. I’m not a great fan of his paintings to be honest, although I can see his talent through his drawings. What interested me was his capacity to lose himself in his art, hour after hour day after day. A… Read More »
Zionism in Action Let’s call it out for what it is, this wilful destruction of all things Palestinian, this all-consuming genocide, this visiting of death on children cowering in tents. Let’s call it out for what it is, this defiant dissolution of a precarious postwar body of internation law designed to mitigate the… Read More »
Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) was a polymath who studied at Plato’s Academy. He came to differ significantly from Plato in his approach and subject matter however, attributing much more importance to the empirical observation of the physical world than to an abstract, invisible, eternal world of ‘forms’. Forms for him did not exist in a realm… Read More »
Graduating in 1971 I began a Ph.D in philosophy with David Hamlyn at Birkbeck College, University of London. I’d particularly enjoyed philosophy as an undergrad and this was a natural development. However, soon in need of an income I applied for and obtained a research job in sociology, which offered the possibility of doing a… Read More »
So this is an astonishing 500th blog, which means around half a million words. I’ve relished the opportunity blogging allows for ‘thinking out loud’. In other words for experimenting with thoughts without the need to factor in the kind of criteria that restrain in the publishing arena. I’ve given up on celebrating the 500th in… Read More »
We hear often about ‘red lines’ that cannot, must not, be crossed. These are typically held to apply both to individuals and to organisation or collectivities. But it can be a complicated business defining and acting according to red lines. It involves simplifying human relations, if in often very understandable ways. Some examples appear very… Read More »
Social media is replete with left debate, at least on my timeline. Some of it is deeply philosophical or theoretical, and some more explicitly activist-oriented; and typically these comprise entirely distinct discourses. This brief blog raises three issues that I regard as critical to any left action, whether philosophically/theoretically anchored or not. I used to… Read More »