Tag: philosophy

Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority

From Heidegger’s Nazism to Habermas’s Zionism, the suffering of the ‘Other’ is of little consequence. GAZA casualties live statistics We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century Hamid Dabashi Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon,… Read More Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority

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The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence

Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx and Critical Theory, 2012 Reviewed by Ben Watson Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by… Read More The Raya Dunayevskaya – Herbert Marcuse -Erich Fromm Correspondence

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From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates always pursues truth with others. Dialectics therefore is a communal inquiry that aspires to be collaborative, with various participants contributing to a better understanding of the truth. It requires people to reflect on their own point of view and then proceed to understand the viewpoint of others which hopefully leads to… Read More From the Multiversity Cave: Plato and Periagoge

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The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms

NB: The rebellion against reason, the cults of nostalgia or particularity are not new, these ways of thought have been with us a long time; and are a consequence of the divorce of reason from goodness, virtue, beauty and justice. Romanticism is a consequence of the elevation of scientific reason to a status above the… Read More The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms

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Louis Althusser: An Intellectual Adventure (2017)

Louis Althusser – an Intellectual Adventure (2017) This documentary traces the development of the thought of the Marxist French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990), who influenced a whole generation of philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Zizek. Famous for his Definition of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Althusser is credited with reinterpreting Marx in a… Read More Louis Althusser: An Intellectual Adventure (2017)

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Claudia Koontz: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule

First posted December 29, 2011 The Third George J. Wittenstein Lecture: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule  To ‘resist’, from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them Claudia Koonz discusses the appeal of the Nazis’ mandate to ‘Love only the neighbour who is like thyself’ Using examples… Read More Claudia Koontz: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule

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Whither philosophy?

The discipline today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help Siobhan Lyons As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is… Read More Whither philosophy?

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