The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind (Verso 2007)
Category: Intellectuals
The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?, by Adam Curtis (first shown on BBC2, March 2007)
Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, by Stefan Collini (Oxford University Press 2006) Continue reading “Intellectuals: alive and well and going nowhere”
In a documentary made a couple of years before his death, the celebrated philosopher Jacques Derrida was asked whether he had read all the books in his library. Continue reading “Thinking outside the text”
An interview with Adriano Shaplin, the Riot Group
What Good Are the Arts?, by John Carey (Faber 2005)
An interview with David Jubb, artistic director, BAC
Continue reading “BAC-chat: critics, audiences and the importance of the café bar”
In Identity, a short book based on an email exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Italian journalist Benedetto Vecchi, the sociologist discusses the question of identity in the context of what he calls ‘liquid modernity’. Bauman’s thesis, set out in his book of that name (2000), is that we have moved from a solid to a fluid phase of modernity, in which nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human.
How critics of ‘declinism’ are more conservative than they make out
In the twenty-first century, ‘knowledge’ is talked about everywhere but found nowhere. Continue reading “No meaning to knowledge”
Dolan Cummings 