Tradition
Continental
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Reading group: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three short chapters a week
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is short, about seventy pages, in twelve chapters. I have listened to people talk about it in lectures for years and never read it properly. So I propose four weeks, three chapters a week, starting…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu1 reply -
A documentary can stage a scene and still be telling the truth
Every documentary editor eventually faces the question. A woman tells us about the night her brother left home. We have her voice. Do we film her walking the street again at night, knowing she is walking it for us? My thesis: staging,…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Sartre’s “look” and Fanon on being fixed by another’s gaze
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes the moment of being caught looking through a keyhole: suddenly I am an object for someone else, and I feel shame. The look of the other gives me an outside I can't control. Fanon's Black…
Started by Claire Dubois2 replies -
What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the “lived body”?
I am reading Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French and I keep circling the expression le corps propre, usually translated "one's own body" or "the lived body". I understand that he discusses the phantom limb and a patient called Schneider at…
Started by Claire Dubois3 replies -
Arendt’s “Truth and Politics”, read in a newsroom
In 1967 Arendt published "Truth and Politics" in The New Yorker. She distinguishes rational truth (mathematics, philosophy) from factual truth (what happened). Factual truth is the more fragile, because it depends on testimony and records, and it is always vulnerable to being…
Started by Sana Rizvi3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
What Arendt actually meant by “the banality of evil”
The phrase comes from the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It is often misread as meaning that evil is ordinary, or unimportant, or that anyone would have done the same. As I read her,…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
Does translating philosophy change the philosophy?
Philosophical texts are the ones that keep translators up at night. Heidegger's Dasein is left untranslated in English. Sartre's pour-soi becomes "for-itself", which sounds nothing like ordinary English. Hegel's Aufhebung becomes "sublation", a word English speakers learn only from Hegel. Each choice…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Existentialism can ground an ethics, and Beauvoir showed how
The standard charge is simple: if there are no given values, then anything goes. Sartre promised an ethics at the end of Being and Nothingness and never published one; the Notebooks for an Ethics came out only after his death. Beauvoir did…
Started by Claire Dubois6 replies -
Reading group: The Second Sex, Introduction and Part One (“Destiny”)
Let's begin The Second Sex (1949) with the Introduction and Part One of the first volume, the three chapters on biology, psychoanalysis and historical materialism. A note on translations. The 1953 English translation by H. M. Parshley was abridged and is unreliable…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Reading group: ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and work in a call centre by day, which provides most of my material. A friend told me that Adorno and Horkheimer thought comedy on the radio was a form of social control, and I…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction
This month my son sent me a chapter about Hannah Arendt, who says English uses "work" for three different things: labour, work and action. I wanted to know which one I do on my farm. From what I understood, labour is what…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
What is the epoché, and why would bracketing whether the world exists help anyone?
A friend who did philosophy says what I do at the wine-show judging table is "basically phenomenology", which flattered me until I tried to read about it. The bit I'm stuck on is the epoché, or "bracketing". As far as I can…
Started by Bec Doyle4 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
The lesson that works best with my class every year is Sartre on bad faith, from Being and Nothingness. Sartre describes a café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too quick, who bends forward a little too eagerly.…
Started by Rowena Abellana6 replies -
Automated cranes at the port, and Ellul’s idea that efficiency decides for us
Terminals around the world, including mine in Marseille, are moving to cranes operated remotely from an office, and some yards are fully automated. Management's word for it is "inevitable". The union's word is "choice". I want to think about which word is…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Reproduction did not wither the aura of art; it made the aura more valuable
I've just reread Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, from the mid-1930s. His claim, roughly: the original work has an "aura", its unique presence in one time and place, its embeddedness in a…
Started by Chiara Bellandi5 replies -
Reading group: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One on the body
I've read Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) in French more times than I can count, and I'd like to read the first part with people who come to it from bodies rather than from books: dancers, players, nurses, craftspeople. Translation: Donald Landes's…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
Is Wiredu’s consensus democracy what Habermas’s discourse principle looks like in a council?
This term I have been reading Wiredu's essays on consensus alongside Habermas with a few older students, and they keep asking a question I want to put to a wider group. Wiredu argued that traditional Ashanti politics, at least at the level…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Taylor’s happy Sisyphus shows meaning is purely subjective
I make my debaters argue the side they don't believe, so here's me arguing a side I'm only half sure of. Richard Taylor's version of Sisyphus goes like this. The gods, in pity, implant in Sisyphus an overwhelming desire to roll boulders.…
Started by Sam Ellery6 replies -
Schmitt’s uncomfortable point survives: no constitution can fully govern its own emergencies
Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) opens with a sentence that every journalist covering courts eventually meets: sovereign is he who decides on the exception. The argument goes like this. Constitutions specify normal procedures. Emergencies arise that those procedures did not anticipate. Someone…
Started by Sana Rizvi6 replies -
What did Horkheimer mean by ‘traditional’ versus ‘critical’ theory?
I operate a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I'm a union delegate. Someone at a union education weekend said the Frankfurt School started with an essay by Max Horkheimer called "Traditional and Critical Theory", from 1937, and that…
Started by Hugo Marchetti4 replies -
Davos, 1929: was the split already visible in the room?
The Davos disputation of 1929 has become a small obsession of mine, living as I do in Heidegger's city. In the spring of that year, at a university course in the Swiss resort, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated how to read…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it
Look at Hume's list of what makes a good critic: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense. Now ask who has the time to practise and compare. Not my father, who unloaded ships in Marseille for forty years and listened to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Dreyfus’s critique of AI has aged better than Searle’s Chinese Room
I want to defend an unfashionable ranking. Of the two classic objections to the idea of thinking machines, the one that has earned its keep is Hubert Dreyfus's, not John Searle's. Searle's argument rests on an intuition about what the man in…
Started by Derek Hollis7 replies -
Camus and Heidegger both rejected the label. So who actually counts as an existentialist?
I read Camus on breaks at the port, and I was surprised to learn he refused to be called an existentialist. Then I found out Heidegger rejected it too, in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, which seems to be partly an answer to…
Started by Hugo Marchetti5 replies -
Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
My after-school reading circle keeps asking whether a story means what the writer meant, so I am going to read the three classic essays properly, and I would love company here. Week 1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies