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Do not argue about what a good life is: live it
You need to think well in order to live well, and coming to understand what it is to think and live well is the proper business of philosophy. The process of philosophy, with all its theories and methods and technical discourse, is necessary to gain this understanding, but it is not the final end of this activity. We should at some point leave it behind. […]
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Pyramid Scheme
The great pyramid scheme of academic philosophy is in danger of collapsing; and if they are not careful the pharaohs responsible for its construction will be buried beneath ruins of their own making. They cannot complain for getting what they choose.
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Pissed Off
I sound angry. I am angry. I’m pissed off, because you people are pissing away something precious and are so pleased with yourselves for pissing so high, caught up in the competition of seeing who can piss the highest. ‘See me, I am a professor of pissing!’
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Sour Grapes
The difference between the fox and me is that I have tasted the grapes and would not taste them again.
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My Last Lecture: Afterword
A commenter asked what made me say that ‘anyone who talks like this doesn’t belong in the modern university’? In that lecture, to explain something about what philosophy is and does, I naturally appealed to the intrinsic value of the discipline. But the measures of value in the modern university are all extrinsic and instrumental. That essential mismatch of what matters is what makes me say that this kind of view doesn’t belong in the modern university. It is out of place and out of time. […]
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My Last Lecture
I don’t have many recordings of myself lecturing, but one of the few that I do was captured just before the falling of the first in a line of dominoes that would ultimately lead me to leave academia. I view it now with a degree of nostalgia, because everything after this point would not be the same. In this introductory session, I found myself wanting to explain something essential about philosophy that I think has become increasingly difficult to see. But anyone who talks like this doesn’t belong in the modern university. […]
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Romanticism and Livestock Farming
Those who speak positively about livestock farming are often accused of having fallen into an insidious ‘Romanticism’. They view these idyllic pastoral scenes with overly-sentimental eyes, and this clouds their judgement. Is this true? If it were, it might be a problem: it is important to see things clearly – undistorted – and sentimentalism is one of the many distortions of thought that can creep in, like prejudice and other forms of bias. […]
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The Livestock Landscape
It is difficult to correct a misperception when it has become established: people tend to see what they believe, and so if they believe wrongly, they will see wrongly. I want to show you some images that I think speak for themselves. They show two different landscapes. One of these landscapes reflects the reality of growing vegetables in contemporary Europe. The other reflects the reality of livestock farming in contemporary Europe. […]
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The Environmental Impact of Beef Consumption: The Meaninglessness of the ‘Global Mean’
When statistics for the environmental impact of beef consumption are presented, they tend to be based on the ‘global mean’. This ‘global mean’ is meaningless in the UK. Two of the biggest variables in its calculation are deforestation and intensively growing crops as feed for livestock. But it’s absurd to think that these things are serious problems for beef consumption in the UK. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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