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The Doctor and the Donut Seller
Imagine you’re a doctor: all you want is to heal the patients in your care. Your place of work, your hospital, in a drive for profitability (forced by a withdrawal of government support) is taken over, first partially but then as a majority share, by a company that makes donuts and sugary soft drinks. At first nothing much changes: you can carry on with your work as you were and have always been, except the canteen now stocks donuts and sugary soft drinks. But then at some point requests are made, from on high, to include more recommendations for donuts…
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On the Failure of Public Philosophy
What we see today, in philosophy’s public lack of stature, is the end result of a downward slide that started 40 years ago when the balance was tipped against a certain idea of what a university is and ought to be.
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What is Good Philosophy?
At any given time, philosophy is what philosophers do. Look at what philosophers do; look at the picture of success for philosophical activity as it is in this time. You might be disappointed by what you find.
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What is a Pseudo-Intellectual?
What is a pseudo-intellectual? This is a bad question, full of shit, but, like shit, mostly better out than in.
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Believed by the Wise: Socrates, Pragmatic Arguments, and Pascal’s Wager
I’ve been wrestling with an aphorism that I can’t pin down. I want to say this: ‘The wise believe what is good and true, the clever only what is proven.’ But I can’t. The tone may be right, but the content is wrong: or rather, not wrong but factually inaccurate.
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Reflections on the Fate of Philosophy in the University
I wonder if it’s easier to see what might be on the other side of the wall once you’re on the other side of the wall? When I left the university I asked: ‘how can philosophy survive without the university?’ Now I wonder if philosophy can only survive without the university. The university, as it’s become in the past few decades, has made philosophy unrecognisable to itself. It is a version of philosophy in which Callicles is the ideal, not Socrates. That a philosopher would now encourage someone not to pursue philosophy for monetary reasons… If the university is a…
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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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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. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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