Kester Brewin

An interesting thread developing on Twitter with philosophybites – Nigel Warburton under the covers – around ideas of atheism and agnosticism. It’s building towards a telephone discussion on BBC Radio Five Live tonight from 1am (one for the podcast) about whether we should all just say we’re agnostics.
Nigel notes today that there is ‘no problem [...]

Spotted at my local bookshop. Someone’s been hard at work. One would have thought that a single disproof would suffice for the average rationalist. But here we have six. All improved too! Got to love fundamentalists, haven’t you?

Empathy [1] |  Empathy [2]
In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to get to grips with the roots of empathy with the other, and the location of our fears of engaging the other. I’ve radically summarised Levinas and Zizek by saying that the former would locate our fears in the enigma of the other, [...]

I’m interested in this short series in trying to reflect on the best ground for our attempts to empathise with ‘the other.’ In the first post I ended by suggesting that it would be fruitful to consider where our fears of engaging the other lie. So here we go:
It seems to me that Levinas would [...]

One of the themes I have been wrestling with in the new writing I am doing (firm news on that soon, I hope) is around the subject of empathy for ‘the other.’
Philosophical lines appear to have been drawn between thinkers like Levinas on the one hand, and Hegel/Zizek/Lacan on the other. I personally felt more [...]

Beaten Tracks
On the sleepers between
Forest Hill and Brockley
broken rails are lain down,
flanked by the tidy parallels
of clean-humming steel tracks.
They are tensile failures,
pieces and fractures,
all angles and rough edges,
serving brittle punishment
for going out of line
and giving in
when the wheels rolled their backs.
© KB 2009

A very interesting, if complex, debate at the ICA last night between Slavoj Zizek – atheist, Marxist – and John Milbank – ‘radical orthodox’ theologian. Both are clearly fearsome intellects, though doubtless Zizek has the better jokes.
It would be an impossible task (actually, Thomas Lynch does a great job here!) to even attempt a reasonably [...]

In the conversation menu for The School of Life dinner I attended earlier in the week there were a number of aphorisms and quotations to get people thinking, and a few rules too. One rule was based on Oscar Wilde’s famous quote:
Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
I actually think Wilde’s [...]

Having sniffed around all the interesting things they’ve been doing since they started 8 months or so ago, I finally went to an event by The School of Life. And very wonderful it was too.
Taking over the top floor of the excellent Marylebone restaurant The Providores, we arrived and were sat deliberately with people we [...]

Just a final thought to wrap up this series of posts reflecting on some theological implications of the new physics: as I mentioned, one implication of the Many Worlds Interpretation appears to be that of eternal life. The concept of Quantum Suicide suggests that at each ‘quantum moment’ I might die in one universe – [...]