Reading Sipho Kings’s important article on Bhutan, “Forget your GDP, come on get happy” yesterday sent me back to my old TIME-magazines to find an article by Bobby Ghosh (TIME, October 15, 2012) on this tiny country wedged between India and China. The reason why I remembered Ghosh’s article is that it was entitled “This […]
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
What the Samurai can teach the world about a truly human ethos
What does it mean for a people, or a nation (the two are not necessarily synonymous) to have a fulfilling ethos? By ethos (on which I’ve written here before) I mean broadly the distinctive cultural and social character of a group of people as manifested in their collective and individual activities, which are therefore expressive […]
Posted inNews/Politics
On the death of a (benign) revolutionary
This morning, just after reading the news of Nelson Mandela’s death — uncannily coinciding with the world premiere of the film on his life — my partner and I were exploring the beautiful churches in Freiburg, Germany. In one of them (the Herz-Jesu) there is a series of magnificent paintings by Charles Bevaert, (I hope […]
Posted inGeneral
Beautiful, but expensive Basel
Basel is among the oldest cities of Europe, and architecturally speaking, among the most beautiful. Its founding antedates the beginning of the common era (CE), and its history from the Roman through the medieval to the modern period is as chequered as any city’s could be. It is a relatively small city, with just over […]
Posted inGeneral
Tarzan revisited
The story of Tarzan is familiar to millions of readers and movie fans all over the world. In addition to the original narrative (Tarzan of the Apes), more than 20 subsequent Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs fleshed out the story and concomitantly the parameters of what is ultimately a myth, mainly, but not exclusively […]
Posted inTech
What ordinary people don’t know about the deep web
The November 11 edition of TIME magazine features a cover article on “The Secret (or Deep) Web” (pp20-27), which most regular users of the internet are not even aware of — I, for one, did not know that what I had always regarded as that most splendid of inventions, the internet as “horizontal”, democratising axis […]
Posted inGeneral
Familiar places and foreign spaces
After a particularly strenuous semester, particularly regarding postgraduate students’ work, and on the eve of a much-needed overseas trip to a conference in Europe, I am reminded, again, of Michel de Certeau’s wonderful exploration of spatial practices in The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988), on which I have written here before […]
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
All hail women!
An article in a recent TIME magazine (“The last Politicians”, by Jay Newton-Small; TIME, October 28, 2013, pp46-50) has brought home to me, once again, how different women are from men, and what a pity it is that they, our human “sisters”, have not remained in the social leadership positions that, according to several accounts, […]
Posted inEnvironment, News/Politics
The normalisation of the unthinkable
We live in apocalyptic times. This is the considered belief of an extraordinary contemporary philosopher, who also phrases it as Living in the End Times — the title of a book that appeared in 2010 (Verso), and which contains between its covers so many intellectual tours de force that I, for one, will not even […]
Posted inEquality, General
Women and unconventional morality
The implications of the heading, above, are not as simple as it may appear. I can imagine most feminists immediately reminding me that adopting a different discursive orientation — different from patriarchal discourse, that is — is already highly unconventional. As a male feminist (no, it’s not an oxymoron) myself, I would agree, but that’s […]
Posted inGeneral
Mirror wars
The crime novel I referred to in my last post (The diversity of individuals), Leif Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End) is a real treasure trove of wisdom on life, love, good, evil, and a host of other things that really matter. It is much more than just a crime novel; it is a […]
Posted inGeneral
The diversity of individuals
Some individuals are gregarious, and others are solitary. It is probably also the case that there is a group in-between these extremes – those people who are neither solitary nor gregarious, but are happy with their own company when alone, and comfortable among others at work, at play and on other social occasions. It is […]