Booked Out

I miss many aspects of my chaplaincy training: the deep listening that can blossom in the most unexpected of circumstances, the twinning of action and reflection...

To evaluate states of affairs we use the concepts of good and bad, better and worse. To evaluate actions we use in addition the concepts of right and wrong...

Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades...

The almost subconscious fear that we could be soulless machines manipulated by other powers poses a profound philosophical conundrum pondered since ancient times...

A student of René Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Peter Thiel would go on to report that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration...

Our culture is saturated with authenticity: we’re forever ‘finding ourselves’, ‘self-actualising’, ‘doing you’, ‘being real’, ‘going off the beaten path’, ‘breaking free of the crowd’...

The historical shift currently underway is massive. The ridiculous stories that the anti-woke hucksters and tabloids love to pick up and ridicule are in fact just the faintest epiphenomena of this massive shift...

Awareness joins inner and outer, near and far. It can also be referred to as compassion...

Are academic political philosophers responsible for the persistence of this ridiculous theory?

Far from fitting the stereotypical image of a philosopher, sat in an ivory tower, Ortega y Gasset was engaged with his society and its troubles...

It’s a common enough scenario. A vegetarian has been invited to a friend’s place for dinner. The host forgets that the guest is a vegetarian, and places a pork chop in front of her. What is she to do?

A dream writing; an unreadable writing; perhaps an invisible writing; or maybe a writing that is awaiting reading. And where the effects of said writing are precisely its traces unveiling itself — waiting to be read...

Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences.

Imagine two couples, each at home for dinner. The first couple spends the whole meal caressing each other’s hair, calling each other cheesy monikers

When we think of cancer, we tend to think of death — but what if it is of the order of life?

How is “the world” to be understood? In other words, how does what the world is like—what is “the case”—permit something like “what the world is like” to be thinkable?

Believing, it is what seems to us the least risky act in the world. A simple adherence, an acquiescence to what presents itself or to what we have chosen to identify ourselves with.

What, exactly, is boredom? It is a deeply unpleasant state of unmet arousal: we are aroused rather than despondent, but, for one or more reasons, our arousal cannot be met or directed.

Pandemics in the age of communication technologies are stranger beasts than the parasitical agents that gave birth to them.