Honorary Research Fellow
Delighted to be an honorary research fellow in the University of Kent’s philosophy department. Kent also recently granted me an honorary degree.
ReadAuthor: Julian Baggini
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.
Read
Rituals of grief help us all
Communal commemorations may take arbitrary or even baffling forms, but they have an important role to play in civic life.
Read
Moderation in all things?
Like most enduring wisdom, “everything in moderation” turns out to be nothing more than a vague rule of thumb, something to fall back on in the absence of any other information but certainly not a strict rule to be lived by.
ReadHume the humane
Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now.
Read