Cultural Capital: Philosophy

Most of the Critics section in this week's issue of the New Statesman, out today, is devoted to a philosophy special. The philosopher and writer Raymond Tallis reviews two of the latest contributions to the burgeoning science of consciousness, Antonio Domasio's Self Comes to Mind and Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Dust. Humphrey recently spoke to the New Statesman about his new book.

Can you explain the title of your ... read more

The ongoing dispute over the future of Middlesex University's highly regarded philosophy department was ratcheted up a notch on Friday, when students and three members of the academic staff -- Professors Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward and Christian Kerslake -- were suspended from the university, pending an investigation into their role in a second occupation at the university's Trent Park campus.

Protesters entered campus buildings on Thursday ... read more

It was only a matter of time before the protests of 1968 were alluded to in the Nash Room at the ICA yesterday evening. After an academic year that has brought mounting opposition to cuts in higher education, an impassioned crowd of students and academics from across the country had convened at the arts centre for a debate -- "Who's afraid of philosophy?" -- to ... read more

This week the Dean of the School of Arts and Education at Middlesex University announced, point blank, that the University is to close all of its philosophy programmes. In an email sent to staff, the reason given was "simply financial". The decision -- described by one academic blogger as "venal idiocy" -- has generated a growing online campaign, as did ... read more

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the delight of the French intellectual class at the ridicule to which Bernard-Henri Lévy (aka "BHL") had exposed himself when he was caught quoting the "work" of a fictitious philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul, in one of his two newly published books. BHL's extraordinary media profile in France (think Alain de Botton attracting Katie Price-style column acreage) has ensured that l'affaire Botul won't ... read more

Le tout Paris can't quite contain its delighted disbelief at the news that the writer and "philosopher" Bernard-Henri Lévy has made a fool of himself (yet again). The Times reported yesterday that BHL had quoted liberally, in his new book De la guerre en philosophie, from the work of the anti-Kantian zealot Jean-Baptiste Botul. The only problem being that Botul is a fiction, the creation of Frédéric Pages, a ... read more

There was an interesting letter in the TLS last week from the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel was responding to a letter in the previous week's issue from Stephen Fletcher, a member of the chemistry department at Loughborough University. Fletcher had complained that Nagel recommended Stephen C Meyer's Signature in the Cell in the TLS's Books of the Year round-up.

Meyer's book presents what he describes as a ... read more

By way of an addenudm to my previous post on Tony Judt's recommendation that the centre left set about rethinking the state, let me point you in the direction of Sunder Katwala's post at Next Left on the recent fashion, on both left and right (the "Red Tory" right, at least), for mutualism. Sunder sees in the mutualist tradition a possible alternative to centralised command-and-control conceptions ... read more

The American political philosopher Michael Sandel, whom I profiled for the NS in June this year, has been teaching Justice, an undergraduate course in moral and political philosophy, at Harvard for nearly 30 years now. It's wildly popular, having attracted more than 14,000 students over the years. Watching the video footage of his classes recently made available online by Harvard, as part of a collaboration with ... read more

Last week, Warwick University's Writers at Warwick Audio Archive went live. Containing more than 200 recordings of poets, critics, playwrights, journalists, novelists, academics and musicians reading from, and answering questions about, their work, it represents the digital realisation of over 30 years of collaboration and conversation. Researchers will be able to listen to, say, a 1979 recording of Allen Ginsberg (reading with Peter Orlovsky and Tom Pickard at ... read more

Please take a moment to watch this remarkable video. It's of the great English historian Tony Judt giving this year's Remarque Lecture at New York University. Judt chose as his topic "What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy". Even in normal circumstances, this would be essential reading (or watching). But these aren't normal circumstances, because, a year ago, Judt was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's ... read more

Last night Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and subject of a New Statesman profile last month, delivered a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on ecology. Not one to shy away from theorising on any subject, Žižek tackled the environment and the ideology surrounding the contemporary debate on the politics of climate change with characteristic panache. Speaking with almost nervous energy, he covered areas as diverse as animal ... read more