A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own. Isaiah Berlin They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. […]
A Crack in the Cosmos
Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the […]
Talkin’ about a Revolution
Hegel’s World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University Press, 344 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0691250182 Is human history ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ or rather a heroic story of the inevitable unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on […]
Am I an illusion?
Every day we hear the use of the vocabulary of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ without investigating what is meant by the term. For example, we might enjoy the compliment ‘love yourself’. Or we may well undergo embarrassment if a friend says ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Sometimes it is said by way of affront, ‘don’t take […]
Saving the Enlightenment
Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much spoken of phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical. […]
Just Ourselves
In his 1993 book Pleasant the Scholar’s Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction of the Nation State, Maurice Goldring emphasised the role of intellectuals in shaping Irish cultural nationalism. He distinguished between revolts and revolutions. Without some articulation of ideas that might drive change a revolt could never become a revolution: ‘Gavroche, in Les Misérables, […]
The Gate Keepers
‘Filterworld’ is Kyle Chayka’s term for the systems of algorithmic recommendations that make up an ever greater part of contemporary life. In this collection of determining feeds we find Google, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and many more. Taken together, they make up a high-powered and hugely influential complex of dynamic […]
Confusio Linguarum
Intended as an assault on rigid conceptions of identity, it is fitting that Philippe Mouche’s Bons baisers d’Europe is itself is a hybrid, blending the reflections of a Zeitroman with the plot-driven zest of an espionage novel. Major events of the recent past feature, including Brexit, the war in Ukraine, the refugee crisis, the gilets […]
Just Live
Life … is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills. Virginia Woolf What is the meaning of life? The question always makes my mind go blank. Then a negative answer comes. It has none. It has no more meaning than a cubic metre of space 17,000 miles above my head. What if I […]
Up Mount Improbable
Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, by David Edmonds, Princeton University Press, The subtitle of David Edmonds’s biography of the English philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Surely a mission to save morality is something only a God-like being could take on. And since God […]