Yes, you’ve read correctly. You may not know who Rana Foroohar is, so let me inform you that she is a highly respected business and economic journalist working for TIME magazine, who has just published a book called Makers and Takers, published in May (Crown publishers), in which she makes this (to some startling) announcement. […]
Bert Olivier
As an undergraduate student, Bert Olivier discovered Philosophy more or less by accident, but has never regretted it. Because Bert knew very little, Philosophy turned out to be right up his alley, as it were, because of Socrates's teaching, that the only thing we know with certainty, is how little we know. Armed with this 'docta ignorantia', Bert set out to teach students the value of questioning, and even found out that one could write cogently about it, which he did during the 1980s and '90s on a variety of subjects, including an opposition to apartheid. In addition to Philosophy, he has been teaching and writing on his other great loves, namely, nature, culture, the arts, architecture and literature. In the face of the many irrational actions on the part of people, and wanting to understand these, later on he branched out into Psychoanalysis and Social Theory as well, and because Philosophy cultivates in one a strong sense of justice, he has more recently been harnessing what little knowledge he has in intellectual opposition to the injustices brought about by the dominant economic system today, to wit, neoliberal capitalism. His motto is taken from Immanuel Kant's work: 'Sapere aude!' ('Dare to think for yourself!') In 2012 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University conferred a Distinguished Professorship on him. Bert is attached to the University of the Free State as Honorary Professor of Philosophy.
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why cartoons are linked to human freedom
There is a very obvious reason why cartoons are inseparably linked to human freedom. And here I don’t mean the Walt Disney variety, or indeed any cartoon film, although they are clearly connected to “artistic freedom” insofar as one’s creativity sets the bounds for the imagination as source of the construction of such films. What […]
Posted inEquality, General
How transgressive ‘minor’ discourses can subvert hegemonic neoliberalism
We are in Madrid for a conference on “the posthuman”, and taking in the wonderful art and architecture in this capital city of Spain, including the treasures of the Prado, such as their Goya, Velazquez and Bosch collections. Several papers at this thought-and-action-provoking gathering of scholars committed to change in a world being suffocating by […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Tech
The price men pay for their addiction to porn
The technological revolution that has given us television, the internet and almost inexhaustible sources of image consumption has also, concomitantly, given viewers and internet users access to pornography on a scale almost unimaginable. But, as one should know by now, technology is a pharmakon – poison AND cure – and therefore it should come as […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Disposable objects: The roots of global nihilism today
I have written on nihilism here before, and am returning to it now in light of a striking analysis of its causes by Bernard Stiegler in What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (Polity Press, 2013, Kindle edition). While not ignoring the diagnosis of nihilism in western culture by Nietzsche, Stiegler takes its roots back […]
Posted inEnvironment, General
Ecosocialism can rescue us from ecocatastrophe
In Ridley Scott’s recent film, The Martian, there is a scene near the end that sums up the often ignored value of the earth. Astronaut and botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is sitting on a bench in a park, shortly after having been rescued from a very lonely existence on the red planet, Mars. He […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics, Tech
Why we need a politics of ‘spirit’ not consumption
Most people reading this are probably wondering what a “politics of spirit” could possibly mean. After all, it seems like an oxymoron to juxtapose “politics” and “spirit”. I would agree with that, at first sight anyway. Until you read Bernard Stiegler’s transfixing book, The Re-Enchancement of the World, subtitled: The Value of Spirit against Industrial […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Gelernter: A dissenting voice in the field of artificial intelligence
The relationship between the human mind and body is something that has occupied philosophers at least since the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, bequeathed his notorious “dualism” to his successors. For Descartes the mind was a different “substance” compared to the body – the former was a “thinking substance” and the latter an “extended […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
The ‘perversion’ of Donald Trump’s popularity
A lot has been written speculatively about American presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s popularity, which has seemed surprising to many if his outrageous statements about women or about Mexicans are taken into account. Until recently when he did an egg-dance on the question of women and abortion, trying to correct what he had suddenly realised had […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Islamic fundamentalism in the information age
In the second volume of his monumental three-volume study on the information age titled The Power of Identity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Manuel Castells addresses (as the book’s title indicates) the different ways in which a sense of collective identity is configured at a time when the so-called “network society” has emerged, concomitantly with the global communication-technological […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
‘Decolonisation’, the new ideology
Everywhere one looks today in South Africa you find a new imperative: “Decolonise!” In certain academic quarters it has evidently already attained the level of a new ideology, where academics are expected to “decolonise” the courses they teach (and presumably the articles they submit for publication as well). What astonishes me is that academics do […]
Posted inGeneral, Media, Tech
This is not all that Gyna sapiens (‘thinking woman’) is capable of
How the human species – Gyna and Homo sapiens (thinking woman and man), supposedly – have come down in the world. It does not take a genius to grasp this, although I daresay most geniuses would not waste their time with evidence supporting my statement, above; they probably have better things to do. What I’m […]