Category: Philosophy
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The Discipline of Consent: Who We Are According to the Stoics
An emperor writing in his tent on the Danube frontier, trying to remind himself of what he already knows. A former slave dictating philosophy from a small house in Nicopolis, having survived torture and exile with his equanimity intact. A wealthy senator and playwright composing letters about poverty and death from one of the most…
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Why We Feel Connected to Trees
From the writings of Aya Kōda to the psychology of attachment and the biology of forests, an exploration of the extraordinary relationships human beings develop with trees. In an essay called Poplars, the Japanese writer Aya Kōda describes encountering a cypress with a rectangular opening cut into its trunk. The opening appeared to have been…
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The Garden and the Sufficient Life: Who We Are According to Epicurus
History has been extraordinarily unkind to Epicurus in a specific way: it remembered his name and forgot his philosophy, and substituted in its place a caricature so opposite to what he actually said that it constitutes one of the great intellectual crimes of the Western tradition. He did not advocate luxury. He did not celebrate…
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DIGGER: TOM CRUISE, THE APOCALYPSE AND THE TERRIBLE COMFORT OF BEING RIGHT
In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s audacious new film, Tom Cruise abandons the reassuring heroism of his action career to play a grotesque billionaire whose reckless pursuit of wealth threatens to destroy civilisation. But Digger is considerably more than an environmental satire. Beneath its theatrical excess lies a devastating examination of capitalism, celebrity, political impotence and the…
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The World as It Is: Who We Are According to Aristotle
He spent twenty years in Plato’s Academy, absorbing everything, and then he disagreed with almost all of it. He brought the Forms back down from the heavens and put them inside the things themselves. He said the soul was not imprisoned in the body but was the body’s form — what the body does when…
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The Shadow and the Sun: Who We Are According to Plato
He was the most gifted prose writer in the history of philosophy and the most dangerous thinker in the Western tradition. He gave us the Forms, the cave, the immortal soul, the philosopher-king, and the suspicion — never quite extinguished in the two and a half thousand years since — that the world we see…
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Everything Flows: Who We Are According to Heraclitus
He wrote one book, deposited it in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and walked into the mountains. What survives of the book is approximately a hundred and thirty fragments — sentences, half-sentences, paradoxes, riddles — that have been puzzling serious readers for two and a half thousand years. He is the most difficult and…
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The Gadfly and the Hemlock: Who We Are According to Socrates
He wrote nothing. He claimed to know nothing. He taught by pretending not to teach, questioned by pretending not to have answers, and led the most examined life in the history of Western philosophy — and then, when Athens offered him the choice between his life and his vocation, he chose the vocation. He was…
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One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: Who We Are According to Albert Camus
He is the last philosopher in this series and the one who answers the question the series has been building toward. Not the question of what the self is, or how it is made, or what it is condemned to. The question that Sartre’s radical freedom leaves ringing in the air: given all of this…
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
How Proust Can Change Your Life In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask what…
