[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
Sophocles, Oedipus RexMy experience has been that one of the most heart-wrenching things in life is to …
The War Between Knowledge and Stupidity
Bernard Stiegler was, until his premature death, probably the most important philosopher of technology of the present. His work on technology has shown us that, far from being exclusively a danger to human existence, it is a pharmakon – a …
What is Judith Butler afraid of?
Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …
Roberto Unger: Brazil’s philosopher king
In the depths of the Sixties, Charles de Gaulle, perhaps apocryphally, was quoted as stating that “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be”. This backhanded compliment from the then French president was supposed to illustrate the …
Divided We Fall
The presidential election is still 8 months away. Yet the campaign to preclude a second Trump administration has already reached a fever pitch. In the course of the past two weeks, the public has been treated to “searing” images of …
Health Care: Right, Privilege, or Neither?
Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”
Critically, though, what should be …
The Playmobil Society vs. The Game of Nations
Language, and by extension its emergent feature, narrative, is one of the distinctive characteristics that make us human. Humans are “storytelling animals,” as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall would say; cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer called man an “animal symbolicum” (or “symbolizing …
Technocrats Cut Ireland at the Knees
Driving home after Christmas, we pulled in at the last toll plaza on the M8 to Cork. It had been dark for hours with ‘Storm Gerrit’ still pelting. As I lowered the window to hold out my card, a voice …
Technology: Weapon of the People
In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.):
The utopian and dystopian visions of the …
Technology: Weapon of the People
In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.):
The utopian and dystopian visions of the …
3, 2, 1, Timber
[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]
Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time….
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn …
What We Lost Between Then and Now
Sometimes you find evidence that a prior generation had thought through and solved a moral problem in the oddest of places.
Several years ago, while pondering the fact that life went on perfectly normally during the 1968-69 flu pandemic (even …
How universities killed the academic
Po-faced poIs it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there …
How universities killed the academic
Po-faced poIs it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, there …
The Consensus Conspiracy
What is a consensus? At its heart it is a group of people thinking that something is most likely correct or good or the best way to do or think about something.
What is a conspiracy? At its heart it is a …