Is there any real distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ pleasures?
Does it matter whether our pleasures are spiritual or carnal, intellectual or stupid? Or are all pleasures pretty much the same?
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Category: Articles & Essays
Is the Church of England dancing with the devil?
The Church of England has said “we take the view that it is most effective to be in the room with these companies seeking change as a shareholder.” Is this moral sophistication or mere self-serving sophistry?
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Do you think what you think you think?
We should stop treating instantaneity as the mark of authenticity. What we find at the tips of our tongues or our fingers does not necessarily most deeply reflect who we are.
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Think before you drink – then drink
I intend to make the whole of September, and perhaps even the rest of the year, my “festival of 50”[…]
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The Philosophy of Autobiography
Contemporary anglophone philosophy has paid very little attention to biography. Its traditional emphasis is on the primacy of argument, the soundness of which has nothing to do with who happens to be making it. To bring the life or personality of a philosopher into a discussion of one of their arguments brings accusation of committing the ad hominem fallacy: addressing the arguer not the argument. …ronically, this means that although it was in continental European philosophy that the idea of “the death of the author” took hold, in Britain and America the authorial voice has been quietly but more efficiently and deliberately buried.
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