Wednesday, Feb 8th 2012
Book Review: Embassytown, China Miéville (Pan MacMillan) and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, Alain Badiou (Verso)
Words are a funny old kettle of fish and good sci fi has always been alert to this. In Heinlein’s novel The Whipping Star, what engages the reader’s attention throughout is the difficulty the central character has in communicating with Fannie [...]
Book Review: Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge & London: MIT Press. 2003
Žižek & Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ. Cambridge & London : MIT Press. 2009
Leibnitz famously posed the fundamental ontological question when he said we have a right to ask why there is something rather than nothing [...]
Creature of habit that I am, this month means a getaway to somewhere hot and sunny. The heat is for my better half’s arthritis, the sun is for my ageing flesh. It also means an opportunity for some light reading that can’t be done on the train for fear of ostracism. I can still remember [...]
The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou (Verso 2010)
Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, edited by A.J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens (Acumen Publishing, 2010)
Badiou’s Being and Event, Christopher Norris (Continuum 2009)
Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today - time will tell - and his work is gradually reaching English-speaking readers. His magnum opus, Being [...]
Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, by John Gerassi, 2009, Yale.
Central to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is the concept of Bad Faith, the idea that humans avoid taking responsibility for their actions by pretending they have no choice in how they behave. This can manifest itself in a range of behaviours, such as making [...]
In the July 4, 2009, edition of the BBC World Service’s discussion program The Forum, Nobel physics laureate Frank Wilczek, author of The Lightness of Being, gave listeners a succinct description of the nature of the universe:
Close to the core of quantum mechanics is that you learn that seeing is a very active process. There [...]
If, like me, you have read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Dissemination from cover to cover, and all just out of curiosity, then I think it’s fair to say that 1: You’re a div, 2: You’re a div [...]
