Bert Olivier

In my last post I wrote about Plato’s account of love in his Symposium. But different thinkers have had very diverse conceptions of this phenomenon — and I deliberately do not say “feeling”, because, although love is usually accompanied by certain, fairly intense feelings that people generally locate in their chest or breast area (hence […]

“Money can’t buy me love”, the Beatles sang in their heyday. And, as Joan Copjec has remarked about the founding psychoanalytical concept, “foreclosure” (the fact that some “originary, irredeemable loss” structures our “reality”), something that capitalism’s “logic of gain” cannot tolerate, one could say that love, too, escapes capitalism’s attempts to invest in it, with […]

A dictionary defines “ethos” as: “Shared fundamental traits — the fundamental and distinctive character of a group, social context, or period of time, typically expressed in attitudes, habits and beliefs.” The original ancient Greek meaning of the word is “custom” — hence the definition, above, appears to be consonant with this. Neither should one be […]

I interrupt the series of pieces that I have been writing on the “twelve big questions of science” in order to address something that has obtruded itself so frequently in recent weeks that I feel constrained to say something about it. I hope that the minister of education, Naledi Pandor, whom I have met, and […]

The big dream of physicists, Stefanie Schramm writes in Zeit Wissen, is to capture the universe in its totality in a formula that would fit on a T-shirt. This entails the attempt to unify theories in physics in such a manner that only one would remain: the “theory of everything”. More recently, however, researchers in […]

It seems as if, in light of the success of recent experimental scientific attempts to extend the life of certain insects and animals, immortality is not in principle impossible, as Ulrich Bahnsen observes in Zeit Wissen’s feature on “the 12 big questions of science”. Astonishingly, by means of genetic manipulation scientists have managed to extend […]

In the entry, “Was ist Realität?” (“What is reality?”) in Zeit Wissen — which I referred to in my last post — Ulrich Schnabel begins with a sentence consisting of scrambled words, which, when unscrambled (something one does intuitively, automatically), makes sense, even if in their scrambled state they do (or should) not. For instance: […]

In the most recent issue of the German magazine Zeit Wissen, a discussion is devoted to what is called “The 12 great (big) questions of science”. At first sight some of these strike one as being more philosophical (even metaphysical) than scientific, but on reflection, the German word Wissenschaft, which means “science” in the narrower […]

The phenomenon of life has puzzled and inspired artists, scientists and philosophers for centuries. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in the early 19th century in the romantic sphere of influence (of which her husband, the poet Shelley, was also a part), is but one of many texts that displays a fascination with life, and its creation. […]

One of the most enjoyable things that one can share with one’s wife, husband, lover or partner, must surely be reading with and to each other. And what better form of literature to share in this fashion than the ever “novel” literary phenomenon, to wit, a novel. Sure, if both of you happen to be […]

In his first masterwork, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre – the father of Existentialist philosophy — argues in neo-Kantian fashion that human beings don’t have a choice about being “free”. We are “doomed to be free”, according to him. In other words, even when someone ostensibly chooses NOT to be free – blaming his or […]

My wife, Andrea Hurst, and I have just returned from a most informative – and largely enjoyable – trip to (and through) Egypt, and it was unavoidable to reflect on differences and similarities between this Arabic country with its ancient history and our own country, South Africa, in the course of our travels. On arriving […]