By: Patrick Our final member that morning came in shortly afterwards. Luciano Corallo was one of Joey’s most devoted disciples. Young, handsome, passionate, he was one of the more militant enforcers of the primacy of the interpersonal in philosophy groups. Only recently I had been appalled as he told one of our speakers, a new…
Author: ShiverWriggle
On Meaning: An Interview (Part #7)
By: Patrick Read the previous part of the interview here. Interviewer: What about marginal cases, in which the person is – arguably – incapable of loving, such as a miscarried baby, or a person in a ‘persistent vegetative state’? Do these cases fall outside the category of those capable of living meaningfully? Do we…
In Search of the Good Life: Chapter 1, Part 2
By: Patrick Joey generally refused to eat or drink at the places we hung out. When put on the spot by a particularly insistent waitress, he would begrudgingly order some green tea or something, but generally he would order nothing. He felt that eating (and presumably drinking) was a waste of time, a way to…
Frost
By: everylittlething Frost matches snow for its ability to purify countryside and town. Like most people, I love the snow – the first real snow of the season is a source of great excitement. Those people who tell you they hate it can just go and suck a snowball. It is a wondrous garment…
In Search of the Good Life: Chapter 1, Part 1
By: Patrick We never really worked. Work was for bums, not philosophers. Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness was our Bible. We got by, well admittedly we got by largely as we were all retired having worked bloody hard all our lives, but be that as it may, the world of work was not…
On Meaning: An Interview (Part #6)
By: Patrick Read the previous part of the interview here. Interviewer: Are there specific things that are fundamentally necessary for a meaningful life? Some may suggest that experiencing love, or living for a certain minimum amount of time, or having a social life, are bedrock essentials for achieving meaningfulness. Do you think this is…
Holly
By: everylittlething How easy it is to forget the raw hands and wet socks of a snowball fight – to neglect to remind oneself that lying down with sunburnt shoulders is, to say the least, uncomfortable – and how the joy of collecting holly to decorate the house for Christmas is tempered by punctured palms,…
On Meaning: An Interview (Part #5)
By: Patrick Read the previous part of the interview here. Interviewer: Albert Camus made a famous reading of the Greek myth of Sisyphus in which he characterized human life as fundamentally absurd. The image of a man forced by the gods to push, forever, the same boulder back to the top of the same…
Dear O2 Academy (Sadly, A Letter of Complaint)
By: Lydia Crow Dear O2 Academy, Firstly, I would like to congratulate you on the well-organised and fabulous evening which was the Ben Folds Five gig last night. The organisation at the door was smooth, the venue amazing and the music outstanding. Sadly, however, I must confess there was something which jarred slightly about…
On Meaning: An Interview (Part #4)
By: Patrick Read the previous part of the interview here. Interviewer: This seems to connect with something you touched on earlier, about definition. To define is to make a thing distinct, clear – definite. In boredom, the overwhelming feeling is, as you say, of anxiety, uncertainty. What one lacks is a definiteness about one’s…