A few weeks ago we reported the closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University, and since then the fight to keep it open has continued. Alongside many thousands of people signing petitions, there has been a two-week occupation of one of the large administrative centres on the Trent Park campus, and after that was [...]
On Tuesday the Guardian printed a fascinating and excellent piece by the philosopher Etienne Balibar. Unfortunately they chose to give it the slightly misleading title “Europe is a dead Political Project“. In fact Balibar argues that the European Union, it’s currency, it’s government and its technocrats, is looking doomed, but that this urgently poses the [...]
BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE REPUBLISH! Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email: Dear colleagues, Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche, informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his recommendation’ to close [...]
Straight-up racist that sucker was simple and plain, Motherf**k him and John Wayne.* Chuck D’s immortal rhyme more or less sums up my attitude towards Martin Heidegger in my more polemical moments. Heidegger was a Nazi. Whilst countless others of his generation fled, spoke out and resisted, he happily worked away under the regime. This [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman Islam is enemy No. 1 of much contemporary criticism, either by the angry EDL men on the street, to new atheists asserting that Islam is incompatible with Enlightenment societies, to critics such as Nick Cohen and David Aaranovitch’s’ with their claims to present Islamic bad boys (and girls) as the [...]
Guest post by Tendai. N Philosophy has an unfortunate reputation outside the world of philosophers. And even people who understand themselves to be philosophers are often poets more than anything else. One reason for this is a lack of understanding about what philosophy is, and does: there’s a belief that philosophy is the name given [...]
Something marvellous from Alain Badiou on the poverty of so much philosophy: [Mao said] “Cast away illusions, prepare for struggle.” Hold to the truth, cast away illusions and fight rather than surrender, whatever the circumstances. The trouble is that, nowadays, the word ‘philosophy’ is used in an attempt to force upon us quite the opposite [...]
Reports are emerging that the philosopher G.A. Cohen died in the early hours of this morning aged 68. Cohen was most famous as arguably the most significant of the ‘Analytical Marxists’, who attempted to systematise Marx’s ideas into the schemas of analytic philosophy. Implicit, and often explicit, in this task was the purging of the Hegelian core [...]
