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Divining Value
When you realise that water divining is an unreliable method of finding water, you turn away from it, if you want to find water. And so when you realise that the market is an unreliable measure of value, you turn away from it, if you want to have true beliefs about what really matters. The market pronounces philosophy worthless. But this is no more than a water diviner saying ‘there is no water here’. They would not know if there were when there is, or were not when there is not, and so what use is their pronouncement?
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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. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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