RELIGION, FOOD AND THE GOOD LIFE – CHURCH STRETTON, 21 OCTOBER, 19:30. “Religious traditions sometimes celebrate food and eating in feasts, but they also often promote abstinence, moderation and asceticism. Julian will argue that religion gets some things right and some things wrong about the pleasures and virtues of eating, and in this talk he’ll try to unpick the good from the bad.”
ReadKRACHTVOER – ANTWERP, 19 OCTOBER. Julian Baggini is een Britse filosoof die weet hoe hij moet eten. Hij zakt af vanuit Londen om tijdens KRACHTVOER een aantal begrippen in vraag te stellen die wij gemakshalve graag als zaligmakend zien: biologisch, lokaal en seizoensgebonden. Hij grijpt ons bij de kraag en doet ons nadenken over ons jargon. Een filosofische wakkerschudding voor kritische foodies. (Voertaal Engels – thank goodness).
ReadWe should not just run down the road marked “evidence base” but should also make an argument base for the arts, one which is convincing independent of any measurable social goods. ACE’s chair Sir Peter Bazalgette points towards something like this when he looks to “articulate a new language of cultural value that will help all of us to understand better the essential contribution that the arts make to our lives.” He is right, and that new language is not the old bureaucratic language of economic and social impacts.
ReadIn the physical sciences, a plethora of theories is often a sign of weakness, an admission that we haven’t yet worked out which is right. In ethical and political thinking, however, I suspect there is no such thing as one, all-encompassing true theory. Different models describe different aspects of the world but none captures them all.
ReadI say ‘very’ rather than ‘super’. I think mountains are awesome but simply having the right money for my waiter is not. I don’t think I’m amazing: I don’t even believe I should think that. In sunny Silicon Valley, this moderate British scepticism makes me feel churlish and cynical. It certainly has no place at Googleplex in Mountain View, California, where I found myself recently, among 250 ‘thought leaders’ – researchers, writers, educators, artists, policymakers, investors – gathered for the Sci Foo ‘unconference’…
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