Skip to content

Index: Psychology, Philosophy & Education

· Is ‘fear of failure’ a bad thing for students, teachers, or schools?

Friday, 25 March 2011

France’s decline in the international rankings has focused minds. A book by the Paris-based British academic Peter Gumbel published last year titled On achève bien les écoliers? (They shoot schoolchildren, don’t they?) sharpened attention further. In it he argued that the education system was systematically undermining children’s confidence.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· How mystics enter into mystery.

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

We’ve become too analytical. Our approach is about law: Do good, avoid evil. But the mystic is one who, through prayer, enters into the mystery of God as love. Christian life is first of all a mystery, the mystery that the incredible, incomprehensible love of God is the source of all that we are.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· Event: How the light gets in Hay.

Monday, 21 March 2011

Among the 2011 guests will be Susan Greenfield, Colin Blakemore, Zygmunt Bauman, Bonnie Greer, Ted Honderich, Gideon Rachman, Rana Mitter, Mary Ann Sieghart, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Angie Hobbs, Polly Toynbee, Simon Armitage, Lauren Booth, Leela Ghandi, Tessa Jowell, Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock, Bryan Appleyard, David Aaronovitch and many more.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· College admissions: Why blight the hopes of 10,000 kids when you can blight the hopes of 25,000?

Monday, 7 March 2011

In my ideal world, each great university would seek the student body best fitted to make use of its resources, its community life and its idiosyncratic ways of doing things. The admissions frenzy would die down, and we’d be able to worry about the big issues — the real-world ones that affect the vast majority of young Americans who don’t attend selective colleges.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· Arthur Green and ‘the possibilities and limits of Jewish theology’.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

You distinguish my views from earlier Jewish notions of an abstract deity by saying that I “flatly deny” divine transcendence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· Events: Last of the 2010-2011 London Lecture Series.

Friday, 25 February 2011

The last two lectures in the 2010-2011 London Lecture Series take place this evening and next Friday evening in the J Z Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London.  The lectures begin at 17.45 last an hour, followed by half an hour of questions. The  Institute’s lectures are free and open to the public. Please arrive early to be sure of a seat.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events | | Comments (0)

· The unedifying irritations of incomprehensible philosophy.

Thursday, 24 February 2011

Alain de Botton’s general point stands: professional anxieties about the perils of popularisation are not new, nor is the hunger of the average reader for philosophical sustenance.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· How pragmatic is Barack Obama’s belief in compromise?

Monday, 21 February 2011

Obama’s ideas and convictions do not themselves explain his performance as president. It is Obama’s political skills, not his ideas, that seem to be his problem. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”)

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

Events: Robert Grant, John Hyman, Anthony O’Hear, Kendall Walton conclude the London Lecture Series.

Thursday, 10 February 2011

The remaining four events in the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s London Lectures Series have been scheduled. All lectures start at 17.45 in the J Z Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London.  The talks last an hour, followed by half an hour of questions. The Institute’s lectures are free and open to the public, who are advised to arrive early to be sure of a seat.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events | | Comments (0)

Education’s most ‘intractable problem’? Lots of pregnant teenage schoolgirls.

Sunday, 6 February 2011

This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

Marilyn Monroe and Roger Federer in ‘a wonderful world of sacred shining things.’

Saturday, 5 February 2011

Anthony O’Hear: Does The Iliad really give us a picture of the Greeks as happy polytheists, or is it providing foundations of Aeschylean tragedy (as Aeschylus himself said), and even in some ways anticipating elements of Christianity, as Simone Weil thought? Then again, there is indeed a tension, as Dreyfus and Kelly say, between Platonism and Incarnational Christianity, but why can the transition to Christianity, as memorably described by Augustine in The Confessions, not be seen as an intellectual and moral advance?

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

Philosophy and public impact.

Monday, 31 January 2011

Anthony O’Hear: Philosophers, being articulate and argumentative by training, and often having time on their hands as well, will often involve themselves in public affairs. Indeed, despite denials of the fact from some quarters, philosophers as a group punch well above their weight in getting themselves heard in the public square.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Notes & Comment | | Comments (1)

Is being a philosopher the only way to redemption for a serious liar?

Monday, 6 December 2010

In the Internet age, a sordid past is a matter of very public rec­ord—for that matter, of public exaggeration—and if you write fiction and memoir about your worst days, as I did (and continue to do), even your students will take the time to read the racy parts (or at least excerpts in online interviews of the racy parts, or YouTube interviews about the racy parts).

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy.

Friday, 16 July 2010

Juliet du Boulay: To recognize the enduring quality of much that I describe is not, however, to ignore the fact that change has always been a part of village life, and indeed so many changes have happened since I was in Ambeli in the 1960s and 1970s that much of the way of life recounted here can no longer be found. Earlier changes begin with the village itself, which had been built around 1800 by families who escaped there from a lower village which had been devastated by the Turks. Before this some of the big families were said to have come in a boat from the north, perhaps Pelion. These upheavals, however, dramatic though they were, did not necessitate a deep change of values but simply a reinterpretation of ancient themes in the new situation.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Excerpts & Passages, Politics & Culture, Principal Articles, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

Philosophy as a personal journey.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Anthony O’Hear: The picture of philosophy which I am here sketching, in which philosophy is part of a rational, but personal quest for meaning might not be recognised in many philosophy departments (or not by their students, anyway), and would be hard to discern in many of the most acclaimed philosophical writings of to-day.

Also filed in Politics & Culture, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)
The Fortnightly Review