Symposia Archives - Page 5 of 5

Democracy

The Crisis of Democracy is a Crisis of the Left

A capitalism transformed by a strong version of social democracy should be our political goal

November 13, 2018 • by Michael Walzer

It is a crisis for democracy when the left is weak and unable to mobilize its natural constituency. All I want to do today is to unpack that sentence. Why is this a crisis? Democracy requires some degree of equality, but capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies produce inequality: a steady pressure ...

The Crisis of Democracy is a Crisis of the Left

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Creaturely Love

Symposium on Love

May 14, 2018 • by Dominic Pettman

Today I would like to briefly talk about some of the ways I think that love makes us both more and less than human. But first a nutshell version of my understanding of love. Love is a technology (as I have argued in a book called Love and Other Technologies). Indeed, it is ...

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In Love’s Shadow

Reflections on love at the Night of Philosophy

March 31, 2018 • by Rossen Ventzislavov

In the title track from his album Station to Station, at the junction where the music resolutely picks up pace, David Bowie sings: “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine. I’m thinking that it must be love.” [1] In contrast to the accelerating beat, the lyric is riddled with irresolution. Is love ...

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Stoicism and Love, Not a Contradiction

Symposium on Love

March 30, 2018 • by Massimo Pigliucci

Plato’s Symposium, written between 385 and 370 BCE, is one of the classics of Western philosophy, and indeed is a sheer pleasure to read. Not only we are treated to a fun (if utterly non factual!) story by the playwright Aristophanes on the origin of the idea of soul mates, ...

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Symposium on Love

Intermezzo sub species aeternitatis

March 29, 2018 • by Chiara Bottici

It is 5.30 am, that time of the night when the darkness awaits for the light, like an intrepid lover, who has been alone for too long. It is a time of passage, when everything is still dark, but we can already hear the noise of the day break. Day ...

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On Leaping Into Love

Night of Philosophy Love Symposium

March 28, 2018 • by Skye C. Cleary

Remember the last time we had this dinner party, Aristophanes got drunk and went on a rant about soulmates? Here we are -- almost 2,500 years later -- and people still believe in this myth. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Aristophanes was joking! When we fall in love, it does feel ...

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Critical Love

Night of Philosophy Love Symposium

March 27, 2018 • by Samantha Rose Hill

Mériam Korichi invited me to prepare a ten-minute speech for a Symposium of Love that she was hosting at the annual Night of Philosophy. Realizing I didn’t have anything to say about love, I thought about how I might begin to answer the question: What is love? What unfolded was ...

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A Night of Philosophy

Reintroducing the flute player

March 26, 2018 • by Mériam Korichi

25 centuries after Plato’s Symposium… 1. “All you need is love”? “Make love not war”? These slogans were made famous by the radical counter-culture movement in the US in the early 1960’s and were to go viral in the year 1968 when the intellectual, social and political contestation spread to the whole ...