Chris Horner teaches, studies and writes about philosophy and many other things. He is the co-uthor (with Emrys Westacott) of the CUP book ‘Thinking Through Philosophy’. He has studied at the University of Sheffield, University of East Anglia, Goldsmiths and Roehampton University and has a PhD, the subject of which was Hannah Arendt and Kant’s Theory of Reflective Judgment. He has a strong interest in politics, history, literature, the visual arts and music. He is a keen landscape photographer. Email: chris.horner2 [at] btinternet.com
by Christopher Horner Immediacy itself is essentially mediated —Hegel Look at that desk in front of you right here, now. Isn’t it just there, a bare existence, a simple immediate thing right in front of you? The senses register its presence. This, at least, is a bare fact that you know. But look again at…
by Chris Horner Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death —Wittgenstein The anaesthetic from which none come round —Phillip Larkin What can we do with the thought of death? Nothing can be done about death: you, me, everyone will die. Thinking can’t remove the fact. But the thought…
by Chris Horner Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason… —Keats. To become mature is to have regained the seriousness one had as a child at play. —Nietzsche Why do we want to know ourselves? Self knowledge seems like…
by Chris Horner You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometime you might find You get what you need —Jagger/Richard Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. —Robert Frost Life can be full of obstacles to getting what we want. But sometimes we get it, we get…
by Christopher Horner Why do we value art? I am going to suggest that a large part of the answer is to do with its unique power to disclose and convey areas of our lives unavailable to us though other means. Art, on this account, is a kind of communication, and kind of act: something…
by Chris Horner Imagine you are put in regular close contact with someone who regularly makes your life difficult. This could be at work, or a flat share, anything. They leave you to finish the chores they start, invade your space, and generally act in an inconsiderate way. You’d like to put some space between…
by Chris Horner if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives —W. H. Auden ‘In memory of Sigmund Freud’ Undead Freud and psychoanalysis seem to be in a state resembling Schrodinger’s famous…
by Chris Horner What should we look for in literature? And in the arts and humanities in general? It’s a large question with many answers, some better than others: entertainment, edification, elevation – and much more. A more limited question might be: what is the point of studying it? Let’s stick with literature as our…
by Chris Horner The general terms ‘true’ and ‘good’ or ‘wisdom’ and ‘virtue’, with which stoicism is stuck, are on the whole undeniably uplifting, but because they cannot in fact end up in any kind of expansion of content, they quickly start to become tiresome. —Hegel [1] Stoicism seems to be everywhere at the moment,…
by Chris Horner The illusion of rational autonomy The world is full of people who think that they think for themselves. Free thinkers and sceptics, they imagine themselves as emancipated from imprisoning beliefs. Yet most of what they, and you, know comes not from direct experience or through figuring it out for oneself, but from…
by Chris Horner Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. —Proust …for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. —Rilke Everything demands our attention. A ceaseless stream of electronic information and entertainment flows through and around us.…
by Chris Horner The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.…[…] We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe. […] It is a a “code red for humanity. —António Guterres, United Nations Secretary General. The…
by Chris Horner A look forward, and backward, to some ‘cultural stuff’ for the coming year, old and new things worth seeing, hearing or reading. Here we go: Tár. Unless you have been cut off from all media in the last few months, you probably will have heard of this new movie from Todd Fields.…
by Chris Horner A choice of ‘cultural things’ I enjoyed in 2022 and which you might like, too. Some were from well before this year, but discovered by me in ’22. Novel, non fiction, concert, recording, exhibition. Here we go: Novel: The Odd Women – George Gissing. This is the kind of novel which when…
by Christopher Horner Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a…
by Christopher Horner Port Sunlight was a model village constricted in the Wirral, in the Liverpool area, by the Lever brothers, and especially under the inspiration of William Lever, later lord Leverhulme. Their fortune was based on the manufacture of soap, and the village was built next to the factory in the Victorian/Edwardian era, for the…
by Chris Horner They all want it: the ‘digital economy’ runs on it, extracting it, buying and selling our attention. We are solicited to click and scroll in order to satisfy fleeting interests, anticipations of brief pleasures, information to retain or forget. Information: streams of data, images, chat: not knowledge, which is something shaped to…
by Chris Horner Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth –Philip Larkin Wordsworth as the poet of loss and lack William Wordsworth’s poetry can seem all too familiar, what with all that wandering lonely as a cloud. But he is stranger than we often remember him. Take this, for example: Twilight was coming…
by Christopher Horner Kant on Beauty Immanuel Kant is perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788) famously investigated the the limits to human knowledge and the nature (as he saw it) of true morality respectively. But in 1790 he turns his attention…
by Chris Horner No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures —Dr Johnson Without music life would be a mistake —Nietzsche Music started for me with whatever was blaring out of the radio, and later those 45 rpm ‘single’ records that were the main vehicles of listening pleasure for teenagers in the late twentieth century.…