“If a man would pursue Philosophy, his first task is to throw away conceit. For it is impossible to begin to learn what he has a conceit that he already knows.” Epictetus LXXII

This wordle is created from an essay I wrote about Foucault’s notion that modern society “put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning sex”.  

I just read again Barthes writing on waiting for the loved one and enjoyed it so much that I’ve copied it below in ‘more’. For Barthes, waiting is that “tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being”. Although Barthes never wrote a single major piece, what he did write had a profound influence […]

I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s “The Therapy of Desire” at the moment which is a book that came about from a series of lectures (The Martin Classical Lectures) on Hellenistic (ancient Greece and Rome) ethics that Nussbaum gave in 1986. In her introduction, Nussbaum sets her parameters for “the idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy” […]

Thanks Tess, I would enjoy being in Brisbane for this seminar: Our houses are bigger than ever, but our families are smaller. Our kids go to the best schools we can afford, but we hardly see them. We’ve got more money to spend, yet we’re further in debt than ever before. What is going on? […]

I have been meaning to post these updated philosophical discussions for some time now, and finally I have done it. The Index page is here Or go directly: Stoics added a vital ingredient to our understanding of selfhood. What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World. A discussion in relation to the 'Discourse Ethics' of Jurgen Habermas. How […]

As a student of philosophy and contemporary cultural theory I was impressed to come across this definition of culture from a lecture presented in 1977 by Daniel Bell. Similar words have been spoken many times in many different ways by many different persons, but this passage struck me as being very succinct. All the better […]

Can we distinguish political choices from philosophical truths? Seyla Benhabib discusses this and more in this review of “Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl L?with, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse” by Richard Wolin. Benhabib comments; “Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of […]

Timing So….1.57 am and I have just completed an essay for Contemporary Philosophy that has been on the boil for the last four days. The subject matter of Emmanuel Levinas’s opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of phenomenology (yes.. I can spell that without thinking every time now), and his differences in philosophical perspective from […]