Category: Serials

By: Patrick   It may be that the supposed virtue of being open-minded enough to change one’s mind is a relatively modern phenomenon. I often feel slightly repelled by small-minded people who have lived in small villages all their lives and have rather blunt opinions about outsiders, whether in relation to gender, class, sexuality, or race….

By: Patrick   A lot of people think of philosophers as quite odd fish, and rightly so. Often this has to do with the fact that they often try and convince you that tables are not really there, for example. Philosophy and madness have much in common – indeed Wittgenstein referred to philosophy as a kind…

By: Patrick   At this point it is worth taking a bit of a digression from the bickering and squabbling, specifically a more philosophical digression. I always feel more comfortable when the members of the society fall out over philosophical ideas rather than ideas about what philosophy is. These latter meta-philosophical questions tend to lead to…

By: Patrick   My comment did indeed steer the evening’s discussion into a new and unexpected direction. It was notable that very little time was actually spent discussing the question that I had posed, for with a kind of painful inevitability the group seemed drawn to a far more pertinent question concerning anarchy and the…

By: Patrick   So anarchism was the theme for today’s meeting. Leading proceedings was Pietro DeMarco, a bearded bankrupt with badly bloated bowels. Perhaps my alliterative goals have done something of an injustice to Pietro, so I should probably try and rectify that before proceeding. Pietro is indeed a bankrupt and he does indeed have a…

By: Patrick   Artie died today. Or, maybe yesterday, I don’t know. The email from the secretary wasn’t clear. And I didn’t know Artie well enough to consider the details worth chasing up. A lot of our members seem to die. I hope they die well. Otherwise we may stand accused of having let them…

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…

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…

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…