by Joel Marks On 19 January, 1999, I sent an email to one Rick Lewis, Editor of Philosophy Now, inquiring whether the magazine might be in the market for another columnist. A friend of mine had returned from vacation with a copy in hand to show me. I instantly glommed on to it, perceiving a …
Jeremy Barris enlists the help of Plato, Ortega and pragmatist philosophy to argue that love at its deepest is our connection with ultimate truth, and that this connection is found in our love for our dogs. If dogs are not our best friends, they are among them. We love them, they love us, and these …
Tim Madigan on what philosophy means to him. “Food, glorious food!What wouldn’t we give forThat extra bit more –That’s all that we live forWhy should we be fated toDo nothing but broodOn food,Magical food,Wonderful food,Marvelous food,Fabulous food!”‘Food, Glorious Food’ from the musical Oliver! It has been my great fortune to write a regular column for …
Thomas Morrison looks hard at Michel Foucault’s problem with science. “… discourses themselves are neither true nor false”(Power/Knowledge, p.118) “The confession [is] the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex”(History of Sexuality Vol. I, p.63) Flamboyant French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is as well known for his historical analyses of criminality, …
Mike Austin listens to Bono while reading Kierkegaard, and discovers that they have the same soul. The death of his mother had a huge impact on him and on the substance of his writings. He became disenchanted with organized religion, harshly criticizing it while at the same time embracing a personal faith in God. In …
We Get To Carry Each Other: U2 and Kierkegaard on Authentic Love Read More »
Felicity Joseph finds that sometimes it’s hard to become a woman. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”Simone de Beauvoir Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We …
Becoming A Woman: Simone de Beauvoir on Female Embodiment Read More »
Peter Mullen explores the argument that by definition, God exists. In one form the Ontological Argument for God is basically the argument: 1) God is by definition the perfect being; 2) It is more perfect for a perfect thing to exist than not exist; 3) Therefore God exists. This argument for the existence of God …
Nobody ever put food on the table by worrying about the notion of authenticity… or did they? Gordon Giles on authentic culinary performance. Here we have a recipe for Spaghetti alla Carbonara – a Roman dish, whose flavour is owed mainly to the ingredient known both to us and Italians as pancetta. Camisa explains: “Pancetta …
Karen Parham asks how close Western philosophy gets to Buddhism. Why did René Descartes (1596-1650) name his famous treatise Meditations on First Philosophy? Broadly speaking, ‘to meditate’ means ‘to think deeply about something’ (OED). Although Descartes probably meant the word in this general sense, I would like to look at whether his method, and Western …
Matei Tanasă asks if we should love the unlovable. Do all people deserve to be loved? To be able to answer such a question, we must first understand its meaning. So first, what is love? The common view regarding love meets Plato’s view on it quite nicely. His view as elaborated in his dialogues Phaedo …