Occupy

I thought it would be interesting to start a discussion on the Occupy protests that have currently made themselves so prevalant. What is your view on the movement? Is capitalism the lesser of all the evils? What do you think Karl Marx would have to say about this -- and is it simply just a cry out for communism?

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Ever since the Occupy protests started on September the 17th of last year, the movement has grown exponentially. There are well over 2000 occupy groups, spanning over around 80 countries. The first widely known occupy protest was held in New York, by a group going by the name of 'Occupy Wall Street.'

You may have heard of the Occupy protests, seen them on the news -- but what is it really all about?

The movement is innately anti-capitalist. The slogan "we are the 99%" is in reference to the top one percent of earners owning most of the wealth-- and therefore holding the most power. We can see this in effect quite vividly in America, where the top 1% of earners own around 35% of the country's wealth and the top 20% own, staggeringly, around 80% of the country's wealth.

The goal of the movement is to, in general, empower the lower classes by redistributing the world's wealth. Even a small fraction of the earnings of the top 1% would be enough to help a lot of services and a lot of people. People from the movement believe that it is unfair or even unjust that the balance of wealth is so skewed. Therefore, the movement is very much in favour of ideas such as The Robin Hood Tax.

Read More
The Occupy Movement on Wikipedia
The Robin Hood Tax

The Occupy Nottingham Camp Site

Nottingham has its own Occupy protest camp, which has been there for some time. The camp is currently situated in the Old Market Square near the fountains. They have even set up an information tent where you can drop in and ask them questions.

Occupy Nottingham
Occupy Nottingham on Facebook

Philosophy - Red Week Events

Philosophy – Red Week Activities

Tues 14th
Philosophy Drop in Session (all years) 11-1pm in room 215 – with Ruth Griffin
Come along to this informal student led drop-in session where we can discuss anything relating to Philosophy at NTU. This is your chance to seek guidance about assignments or class tests, discuss your dissertation, debate topics of Philosophical interest, or simply revisit areas which you are unsure of - or would like to pursue further - within a friendly and informal environment. All years welcome.

Weds 15th
12-3pm in room 215 - MA Research Presentations – Open Discussion – With Patrick O’Connor and the MA Students
The MA in Philosophy students of Nottingham Trent University will present a showcase of their current research and studies.
Presenting short 20 minute papers Jim Bunker, Verity James, Zak Miller, and John Bregan will present short talks on the
value of egoism, the philosophy of film, Leibniz and Newton on time and space, and philosophy and the recent riots. This will present an exciting opportunity for undergraduates to see what it takes to be a philosophy postgrad, and maybe even give them the opportunity
to test their mettle against their more ‘senior’ postgraduate colleagues!!!


Friday 17th 11-1.30 pm in 215 – Screening – ‘Tree of Life’ - With Neil Turnbull


This is an important film in philosophical terms – possibly the most explicitly metaphysical film made in recent years. It explores ideas of nature and creation in relation to ethical issues and especially the relationship between nature, love and loss. It is quite mind-blowing at times. Please try to get along to this and join in the discussion afterwards.
Here is a recent review of the film by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/16/cannes-2011-the-tree-of-life-review)


Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love.
Sean Penn has a central but minor role as Jack, a careworn 21st-century corporate executive who is now disenchanted with his life. At the moment of crisis, he is carried back to an ecstatically remembered 1950s boyhood in smalltown America. He remembers his relationship with his demanding, disciplinarian father, played by Brad Pitt, and the brother who died at the age of 19: the news is brought to his distraught mother (Jessica Chastain) via an official communication – the telegraph delivery boy thrusts it into her hands and walks quickly away – so he appears to have died on military service.
Jack realises that time, far from healing the wounds of loss, only makes them more painful. Along with the dream-lit tableaux from his childhood, he is vouchsafed extraordinary visions of geological time and the unknowable reaches of the universe, in comparison with which his loss is meaningless. And yet meaning has to be found if the pain is not to be unendurable. In a sense, the purpose of these gigantic visions is to anaesthetise the pain of being alive and not understanding.
Brad Pitt dominates the bulk of the film as Mr O'Brien, who appears on the face of it to be a God-fearing family man with a button-down shirt and crewcut, brusquely but sincerely in harmony with his gentle, beautiful and profoundly religious wife. Chastain has a voiceover at the very beginning asking her sons to prefer God's grace to the beauties of nature, as the truer path. But O'Brien is far more complex than first appears: he is angry with his boys; he respects the severity of traditional churchgoing belief, but aspires to riches and worldliness, taking out patents in the aeronautics industry and dissipating the family's means in the process.
He challenges his boys to hit him, to toughen them up, and does not hesitate to hit them for disobedience and discourtesy. He plays the organ in church and is a disappointed musician; his frustration and rage simmer from every pore. His boys feel fear as well as love: Malick shows how they have fused into the same emotion. They are encouraged to respect his violence and secretly to feel contempt for their mother's gentleness, and yet their fascinated alienation expresses itself in one startling scene involving an incursion into the parental bedroom.
And there are the baffling and bizarre symphonic passages of non-narrative spectacle, prehistoric jungles, arid deserts, galaxies and spiral shapes – Kubrickian landscapes of wonder. Weirdest of all is the engorged river in which a wounded dinosaur lies prostrate; another dinosaur comes along, plants its great foot on the other's neck and then moves heedlessly on. Is this the only message of the universe – pure survival? But then how is it we want something other than survival? What do we want to survive for? And Malick appears, through sheer crazy excess, to bring his movie closer to the ultimate question: why does anything exist at all?
This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

NT/RG/POC – Feb 2012

Zizek?

I thought that it might be a good idea to get a debate going about the overall philosophical/intellectual significance of the ideas of the media-savvy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

I have been spurred on to do this because some academics whose opinion I respect have told me in conversation that they think Zizek is essentially an opportunist and a charlatan who when you examine his texts in a serious and sober way has very little to say.

I wonder what people's opinion might be regarding this claim? I am minded to disagree, but I am not sure why exactly. On relfection, although I really enjoy reading Zizek I am not sure that I have grasped anything that can be termed a coherent intellectual position. There is clearly an anti-postmodern commitment to universalism in his work - but this is pretty thin beer and nothing that we could term 'distinctive'. There is of course also the Lacanian stuff about enjoyment and the contemporary super-egoic compulsion to enjoy - but again this doesn't really provide the basis for a substantial philosophical position. Perhaps this isn't the point. Perhaps Zizek is really like a modernist artwork, designed to shock (and in this way he is perhaps close to Nietzsche).

Maybe someone could enlighten me and spell out exactly, in nuce, what Zizek's intellectual position might be?

Neil T

The Philosophy Town

Here is an interesting documentary on the work that is being done in Malmesubry which has fashioned itself as Britain's Philosophy Town.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b017551k

Philosophy – Red Week I Events Programme
Monday November 14th, 1-4pm, room 215 – Screening: The Examined Life – Introduced by Patrick O’Connor

The Examined Life presents some of the world's most well known philosophers back on the streets where philosophy began. See Slavoj Zizek, Peter Singer, Judith Butler and Avita Ronnell in Astra Taylor's documentary. Here they debate and reflect on the key philosophical conundrums of our age in places and spaces which represent their ideas. This documentary offers some great moments with some of the most prominent of contemporary philosophers, and their urgent responses to contemporary problems.

Tuesday– 1-5pm: HEA Symposium on Philosophy Teaching – Room 219
This symposium will present a number of papers on best practice in philosophies of teaching. The aim of the Symposium will be to conceptualize different practical approaches to the teaching of Philosophy in an effort to create flourishing learning environments. The symposium will engage the concept of teaching in philosophies in practice, examining the relationship between the formation of thinking and critical learning environments. Lecturers and students are invited to contribute on what are the best forms of philosophical teaching, the wider significance of philosophy, the relationship between the teaching of philosophy and technology, and generally what makes a good philosophy teacher a good philosophy teacher.
Prof. Tony Burns, University of Nottingham. ‘Introducing Philosophy through Works of Literature and Film: The Example of The Matrix’.
Dr Neal Curtis, University of Nottingham. 'Teaching Philosophy to Counter Dogma.'
Dr Keith Crome, Manchester Metropolitan University, “Transgression and Thought: The Role of Habit in Learning Techniques.”
Dr Sara Motta, ‘Teaching Philosophy as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility.

Weds 1.30-3 pm, room 215 – Level 2 Drop in Session: With Ruth Griffin
Come along to this informal student led drop-in session where we can discuss anything relating to Philosophy at NTU. This is your chance to debate topics of Philosophical interest, revise for Class Tests, seek guidance, or simply revisit areas which you are unsure of - or would like to pursue further - within a friendly and informal environment.

Thurs 11-2pm, room 215 – Screening – Paris Texas: Introduced by Neil Turnbull

Paris, Texas is probably Wim Wenders' most well known, critically acclaimed, and successful movie, winning a number of international prizes including the Cannes Palme D'Or for Best Film in 1984.

This unusual road movie, with screenplay by acclaimed playwright Sam Shepard, tells the tale of Travis, a man lost in his own private hell. Presumed dead for four years, he reappears from the desert on the Mexico border, world-weary and an amnesiac.
He traces his brother Walt who is bringing up Hunter, his seven-year-old son, his ex-wife Jane having abandoned him at Walt's door several years before.

As virtual strangers, Hunter and Travis begin to build a wary friendship and conspire to find Jane and bring her back to be a real family.

With extraordinary performances from Harry Dean Stanton as Travis and Natassja Kinski as Jane, the film also boasts a soundtrack by Ry Cooder, ideally suited to the film's sun-bleached landscapes and melancholy undertones.
See -http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/paristexas/paris_texas.htm#

Friday 11-1pm, room 219 - Level 1 Drop in Session – Neil Turnbull
This session will provide an overview of the level 1 course so far with opportunities for discussion and debate regarding the key issues raised. Come along to these sessions if you wish to clarify any issue that you have found obscure or opaque or if you would like to engage in friendly philosophical debate with your tutor and fellow first year philosophers

Philosophy and Employability

Here is a link to a good Times Higher Education article on the relationship between Philosophy and Employability. The author makes a number of interesting points about the relationship between Philosophy and getting a job. While all the usual suspects are touched upon- analytical skills, autonomous learning, thinking outside the box etc. - the article makes two interesting points. Firstly, the rate of students taking Philosophy was on a gradual increase from 2001 onwards (How the change in the fee structure will affect this for better or worse remains to be seen). Secondly, Philosophy with its focus on coming to terms with dense and abstract material, as well familiarizing oneself with the 'argumentative structure' of texts and debates is valuable for a range of employers who appreciate the transferable skills that Philosophy offers. The basic point I supposeis, that Philosophy offers you the ability to position yourself in a number of employment contexts. This would seem to my mind very attractive for students, since it offers you many different paths of career development. As the article shows, Philosophy is valuable in the existing economic order. The reason it is valuable, is because there has been a move from an industrial society to one based on what is known as the 'knowledge economy'. This means that jobs which are devoted to the creation and management of knowledge are widely available. While certainly discourse surrounding the 'knowledge economy is abstract there is an underlying logic to it. More and more jobs are based around the management of information. Philosophy on its own or in conjunction with postgraduate study can get you into a number of careers such as finance, modern technology industries, internet companies and the civil services amongst others.

Multiculturalism

Hello everyone

I would like to get a discussion going about the costs and benefits of multiculturalism. I think that this is gouing to be a very important political issue in the next few years - and as philosophers we need to get a handle on this issue and an overview of where the debate might be heading.

For some liberal philosophers the choice today is between multiculturalism and some kind of fundamentalism. Multi-culturalism is about peaceful cultural co-existence. Here, if you are not a multi-culturalist then you are some kind of antagonistic proto-fascist.

However, critics of multiculturalism argue that core cultures are in essence incommensurable and so any attempt to impose a multicultural society will only succed by means of a 'repressive tolerance' (political correctness and the like) that silences cultural dialogue and exchange.

It would be interesting to see what people think about this issue and get a - polite - debate going about whether it is possible to live in a complex liberal socety without a good deal of antagonism.

Neil