What's Changing? - Philosophy
Please see below selected recent philosophy-related change.
See also:
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Philosophy
On Henry David Thoreau
Halcyon In Kal…
22 January 2025
In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.
Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.
What's New? - Philosophy
Halcyon curates the most significant philosophy-related content from carefully selected sources. Please contact us if you'd like our help with philosophy-related challenges.
On Albert Camus
I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16. Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and more than 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).
On Legacy
Halcyon Inspired
2 September 2024
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Those who study the stories and myths we tell point out that they often share remarkable similarities. They very often involve a separation from home, a test of character, and then a return home with new wisdom or strength. One of these transformative trials comes when we lose someone we truly and deeply love. Those who have known grief understand something more about life. When we suffer the loss of someone we love, we know what it means to be left alone and behind.
What's Changing? - Civility
Please see below selected recent civility-related change.
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May 2024
- In Citizens, Jon Alexander argued that the "Consumer Story" has been in place for less than a century. Before this, we lived inside the "Subject Story" - as in “subjects of the king” - which lasted centuries, casting the majority of us as infant-like and dependent, with just a superior few capable of deciding and leading. And now? Now the Consumer Story is failing. The Subject Story is resurgent. But at the same time, a new story - the "Citizen Story" - is taking shape across the world, and in every aspect of society. In the Citizen Story, we see ourselves as the creative, capable, caring creatures we are.
April 2024
On Jean-Paul Sartre
Halcyon In Kal…
27 April 2024
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism
Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I studied at university and whose work has interested me ever since, introduces us to the idea of our absolute freedom. While he admits that we are limited by some physical and social circumstances, he places us utterly in charge of ourselves.
On Friedrich Nietzsche
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star - Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember being enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil, in which he argues that the good person is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice.
On Leonard Cohen
Halcyon In Kal…
10 September 2023
So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear
On David Hume
Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them - David Hume
When I was studying, inter alia, Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh many years ago, local boy made good David Hume was a name never far any philosophy professor or tutor's lips.
Aeon wrote movingly of Hume's life:
"While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’."