BEING AND PLACE
POSTS
I have arranged my "philosophizing" posts according to category. I have tried to arrange them thematically so that they link together to form a whole that expands ever outwards. And then returns to the inner life.
The Politics of Being and Place
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PHILOSOPHY
Hearing the Deep Cry of Meaning (Frankl and the quest for meaning)
Words in-Action (writing as acting).
A Few of us have Many Eyes (seeing through the mind's eye).
Scientific and Moral Truth (the fact-value dualism)
What Place Value in a World of Fact
Facts, Truths, and Inner Motives
The Blight of Essentialism Hunting (a defence of essentialist metaphysics).
Dialectic and Disclosure (teasing out truth).
Wittgenstein, Bewitchment, and Silence
Science and Questions of Value, Significance, and Meaning
The Slenderest Knowledge of the Highest Things
First Principles and Firm Foundations
There are No Facts, Only Interpretations
In Defence of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful
Virtue Ethics
Kant, MacIntyre, Virtue and the Enlightenment project
Character and the Common Good (MacIntyre and the cultivation of the virtues within the forms of the common life).
The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre and Lewis Mumford
Plato and Aristotle
Aristotle and the Reenchantment of Nature
Plato's Cave, Objective Reality and Morality
Aristotle's Flourishing (Edward Feser)
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Reason and Reality
The Most Influential Living Philosophers
Levels of Cognition (the ascent from instinct and desire at the level of immediacy up to reason and intellect).
Being in Touch with Life (Montaigne)
Between you and reality is a pile of books
Spectators under Eternity or Participants within the Creative Universe
Hegel, Objectification and Alienation
Toward Reason existing in Rational Form
If Reason were enough (Kant, ethics, and religion)
Rousseau, Natural Law and Rational Freedom
The Rational Universe, Creative Human Agency and the Logic of Collective Action
The Whole World Order, against the delusions of separation
From Core to Infinity (a dialogue on mathematics and creativity)
Non-Dualism, the Advaita and Dvaita
The Game of Life: Response to Chess as Applied to Feminism
Alternatives from out of the Heideggerian Corpus
Superintelligence (developing the relation between truth, politics, and people).
The Religious Roots of Rational Freedom
The Return of Materialist Dialectics
POETRY, ART, AND LITERATURE
Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise
Fire and Ice where would Dante place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth…
For lovers of William Blake – because he kept the divine vision in time of trouble
The Unveiling of a Gravestone to William Blake
The Light Within (Blake and the awakening of the soul against the Megamachine).
In The World of Waldo Williams (the work of the great poet of the Preseli Mountains, Wales).
Marc Chagall - art as a state of soul
Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Place (falling in love outwards).
Poetry and the Moral Sense of Place
The Poetry of Earth (Can poetry save the Earth?)
Ruins (the finite and the infinite).
Samuel Palmer Mysterious Moonlit Dreams
Song of the Earth (Earthcare as soulcare).
The Imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma (In Praise of Ursula Le Guin)
Natural Anarchy (Tolkien's mythos vs neurotic power worshippers and controllers).
Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise
Ecopoetics: Disclosing the Hidden God in Nature
Finding Meaning through Metaphor (Metaphors grow the mind, feed the soul, and deepen empathy for the planet).
Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment
Fire and Ice (Dante and Climate Change)
William Morris and Eco-Criticism
The Beautiful Madness of Don Quixote
Dante's Sweet Symphony - Organisation of Materials
Dante's Journey - The Sweet Symphony of Paradise
Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise
Dante's Sweet Symphony - vol 1 music
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Gerrard Winstanley
Gerrard Winstanley and the Wealth of the Commons and the Weal of the Commoners
Spirit, Reason, Nature, Freedom
The True Commonwealth of Gerrard Winstanley
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ECONOMICS
Markets and Morality: Where do public virtues come from?
The Economics of the Good (Adam Smith)
Marx, ecological rift and the social metabolic order
Green Economics and Sustainable Living
Amory Lovins and Natural Capitalism
The Madness of Capitalist Reason (the demand that Reason take rational social form).
Reform and Reformation (the case for social transformation).
Real Growth and Qualitative Development
The New Economics of Prosperity (the qualitative dimension of wealth, exposing the delusions of quantitative measures)
We have to learn to Collaborate and Share (Stephen Hawking – we need to rethink our attitude toward wealth).
Socially Useful Production (a New Lucas Plan).
Workers of all lands unite - and build the cooperative commonwealth
The Economics of Purpose (E.F. Schumacher and R.H. Tawney).
Shrug and Move On (Ayn Rand).
Converging Crises show that we need an Entirely New Economic System
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ECOLOGY
Heaven’s Performance (A review of Here on Earth by Tim Flannery).
Climate Change and Global Heating
Global Heating – a Guide to the Arguments
Can Climate Crisis be Avoided?
Teetering on the Brink of Climate Catastrophe
Seven Years to Save the Planet ...(Ourselves ...)
The Final Curtain, or the Need for a Biospheric Politics
Eco-Catastrophe in Our Lifetimes
Social Cost of Climate Change too Low
The Scream Piercing Through Nature
Ocean Acidification and Mass Extinction
The Missing Science of Ian Plimer
The National Climate Assessment
Human Link to Climate Change Stronger than ever
Politics and the Climate Countdown
50 Months Left to Tackle Climate Change
Warming Seas and Vanishing Fish
All that is Solid Melts into Air – and Water
We have changed the face of the Planet
Arctic Sea Ice Melts to its Lowest Recorded Level
Climate Change – the Undeniable Truth
Sceptical Scientists see the Light after Climate Change Study
Best evidence yet for Global Heating
Changes: Climate Change, System Change, Civilizational Change, Self-Change
Class, Capital, Climate Change, and Common Good
Tell the Truth - The Capital System is the Problem
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Climate Politics
Pure Wind, or the Need for an International Green Infrastructure
Why are we letting the Big Emitters Control our Future?
Dupes, Idiots, and Climate Change Deniers
Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalism
Public Responsibility – Time to Share the Burden of Proof
Paris Climate Talks doomed to failure
Ignoring climate injustice is not a viable survival strategy
Pentagon chief says climate change threatens national security
The Republic in the Age of Moral Ecology
Ecopolis (Self-Regulation in the Eco-community)
Metaphysical Recovery and Reconstruction (giving practical content to the terms of ethical discourse)
Ecological Virtue (Stephen Emmott and the need for behavioural – and societal – change).
The Age of Moral Ecology (a society of doers, a society of volunteers, a participatory social order in which individuals act well by virtue of dispositions rather than obedience to directives).
Climate Politics as the Reconstitution of Public Life
The End (the reaction of alien nature as the return of the repressed).
The House you will Build (Isaiah's exhilarating vision of social and ecological harmony, a new Jerusalem of justice and joy).
The Green Republic (The Republic in an Age of Social Ecology)
Green Republicanism against Anti-Political Extremism (a critique of the authoritarian, elitist, and coercive implications of the politics of non-politics).
A Civic Environmentalism and a Moral Ecology
A Rational Environmentalism (a defence of rational freedom against scientism and naturalism).
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The Logic of Collective Action
System Change or Climate Change
Reclaiming Politics from Game Playing (the restoration of politics to its ancient meaning of creative self-actualisation within public life).
The Critique of Enlightened Self-Interest
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The Field of Practical Reason
And who will our saviours be? (the need for moral capacity as well as technological capacity).
Save the Planet and we Save the World Economy
Political Change the Key to Addressing Climate Change
Bridging Theoretical and Practical Reason (the need to connect scientific knowledge and technological know-how with ethics and politics within the motivational economy of human beings).
Politics, Psychology and Physics
Building the Political Will and Legitimacy for Climate Action
Climate Accord and the Politics of Friendship
Scientists, Experts, and Civic Engagement Walking a Fine Line
Coercive Environmental Collectivism advancing the Corporate Form (for a genuine public community against environmental philosopher kings and rescue squads).
Laying the Bogey of Eco-Authoritarianism to Rest
Politics for the Restoration of Ecological Hope
System Change and Social Transformation
Re-politicizing the Environment
The Price of Political Deficiency (being alert to the dangers of the corporate appropriation of the environmental cause).
From Green Gloom to Green Growth
Extinction Pacification (against an anti-politics of climate truth that puts politics and people on ice).
Seeing Through the Encroachment of the Environmental Megamachine
Less a Forest than a Thicket of Greenwash
The Unity of Social Formation and Character Formation
The Dangers of Corporate Climate Diversion, Conversion, and Perversion
Climate Mobilization and Transformation
Against Environmentalist Non-Politics
Climate Rebellion - Going Beyond the Default Options
Exposing the 'non-political' politics of the 'classless' class
Taking Practical Reason Seriously
Naturism, Romanticism, and Technocracy
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Making Facts Existentially Meaningful
Climate Crisis as the Opportunity to Become Human
The Transformations of Humanity
Fear and Selfishness and the Environmental Crisis
The End of Nature Without as the End of Nature Within
The Shadow of the Future: Witness Against the Beast
Reformation Against Abstraction
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The Springs of Action
Why has the campaign to get the public on board with regard to climate change failed
Inspiring Environmental Action
The Global Civil Society Movement
Fact, Value and Political Ideology
Geddes and Mumford (large views in the abstract and the concrete: unity in diversity).
Here Comes the Flood (dispossession, denaturalisation, and dehumanisation).
The Existential Truth About Climate Change
Collective Grief, Love, and Joyful Hope
Laudato Si' anniversary (For what do we cherish enough to act).
Pope Francis, climate change, Marx, and morality
Ecological Restoration as a Restorying
Fostering the Inner Motives and Virtues for Environmental Action
Fostering Transformative Motivations Within Communities of Practice
God's Invitation to Play (The Beauty that lights the path to the Truth and Goodness of the World)
God and Nature Come Alive in Relationships (Spinoza's God/Nature as only half a God).
Communalism and Democratic Confederalism - Reflections on Murray Bookchin
Cae Mabon - a Welsh Shangri-La
To Care for the Other (the need to to bridge the empathy gap).
For the Healing (the need to bridge divides and build commonalities.)
Reasons, Emotions, and Motivations
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The Failures of Environmental Politics
A View Out of Dante - Aquinas on Fire in California
Naïve Cynicism or Practical Idealism (the need for a politics of practical and active hope).
Let us not speak of them (against self-perpetuating, self-consuming cycles of climate despair).
To walk like ghosts .. or get politically engaged again
Sic Transit Gloria Civilisation
Dangers and Wrong Paths (The paradox of Enlightenment - modernity's downfall as lying in its advance).
Looking after the Human Environment (the need to pay attention to the health and quality of the human environment as well as the natural environment).
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POLITICS
Against Theopolitical Fundamentalism
Right-Wing Ideology Trumps Common Purpose
Aristo-Populism (beyond a liberalism that is degenerating into corrupt elites and angry mobs).
Ending the Politics of Illusion (the impossibilities of politics when we talk ‘at’ rather than ‘to’ each other).
Enthusing the People (Lewis Mumford)
The Need for Institutional and Structural Transformation
Pushing water uphill (speaking for the people who were left behind – as one of them).
Remembering Joel Kovel (pioneer eco-socialist, visionary traveller and friend).
Recovering the Ethical Dimensions of Socialism
The Bare Faced Lies of the Rich and Powerful and their Lickspittles
Reclaiming Socialism, Reframing Conservatism
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REPUBLICAN VIRTUE AND THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM
Good Government or Representative Government
Rational Freedom and Public Happiness
Neither yes nor no - against sophist politics
Pleonexia and Public Life (against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life).
Free Choice against State Authority (for genuine common force as against the external collective force generated by subjective choice).
Into the Liberal Inferno (the rise of an illiberal liberalism)
Liberal Impotence, Liberal Hypocrisy, Liberal Violence
Modern Liberal Society - Immoral and Lawless
Living in the Sociopathological World
Repersonalisation, Responsibility and Self-Assumed Obligation
Bigotry Speaking Out of Privilege
Rehabilitating the Ethical Life
Virtuous Communities fostering Habits of the Heart
The Politics of Love - Affirming Possibilities for a One Nation Green Conservatism
The Quest for Community, Meaning, and Belonging
Emerging from Under the Shadow of Modernity
Thoughts on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Transcendent Standards
Goodbye to Statues, Goodbye to you
For Civility, Public Life, and Reason
A Positive and Lasting Peace in the Presence of Justice
Restoring Trust and Connection in a New Collaborative Social Order
Donald Trump and the International Institutional Order
Liberty as Licence Destroys Freedom
Reconstituting Public Life through Socialist Transformation
Classless Politics in a Class Society
Socialism or Barbarism: Liberal Centrism Cannot Hold
How the Sophist Politics of the Contemporary 'Left' Liberates the Rich and Powerful
Rational Freedom: Establishing Autonomy and Authority in Balance
Beyond the Endless Cycle of Power/Resistance
RELIGION
Theism and Atheism
In the image of, but not identical
Religion and (the Limits of) Reason
Hell is a Human Invention, and a Humanist Reality
The Death of God and the Abolition of Religion
Nothing Worldly Lasts Forever - Notre Dame
Traditional Cures for Modern Ills
Truth Matters and is a Work of Reason (Aquinas College
The Inversion of the Moral Law
Christian Democracy in the Collision of Moral and Economic Imperatives
God and Nature exist in Relationships
Pope Francis' Letter to Global Popular Movements
Catholic Social Action and Internationalism
Reinstating the Marginalized, and casting off those who work to keep people marginalized
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Religion and Reality
Practices Beyond Perceptions and Conceptions
The Survival of the Most Loving
Peace with the Creator, Peace with the Creation
Biological Necessity, Moral Choice and Climate Crisis
When all else has fallen, love still stands
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Political Peace - Being Thankful, Expressing Joy
The Nativity as the Rebirth of Hope
The appetite for joy pervading all creation
Viktor Frankl and the Reasons to Choose Life
The Little Village Church with the Big Heart
Erasmus, a life devoted to reason and faith
Giving thanks for the wonder that never ends
Why we are born, Whence we come, Wither we go
The Love that Seeketh not its Own
Bodying Forth Truth with a Transcendent Purpose
I Hope for Nothing. I Fear Nothing. I am Free
A well-paced and non-surprising environment
Rebuilding Labour's Foundations: Resolidifying 1
The Labour Metaphysic and the Redemptive Myth of Wealth: Resolidifying 2
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COVID-19
US' Global Reputation Hits Rock Bottom
The Political Attempts to Depoliticize Crises and Delegitimize Critical Voices
Coronavirus Consensus, Class, and Contradictions
CORONAV_R_S - Breaking and Remaking Chains
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REFLECTIONS
Muhammad Ali – Champion of Peace, Freedom, Racial Equality and Social Justice
Old Friends and New - Stan and Ollie
Tatty-Bye, Dear Old Doddy, Tatty-Bye
All Our Days (Jack Charlton)
The Simple Joys of the Jam Butty
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MUSIC
Adieu l'artiste - Charles Aznavour
Eurovision Song Contest Top Twenty Five
Paddy McAloon - Pop's Great Lost Voice
Reflections on Françoise Hardy's Personne d’Autre
Revolutionary Spirit - Liverpool 1976-1988
Solid Air, The Soul of Romantic Melodies
Charles Aznavour - Select Discography
Françoise Hardy in Manchester!
The Sweeping Seductive Melodies of Ennio Morricone
The Woman with a Million Unwritten Poems in Her Voice
My Andrea Bocelli Collection (My personal guide)
Love and Light, Hope and Healing: Andrea Bocelli's 'Music for Hope'
The Sweet, the Sad, and the Sentimental
Colin Vearncombe - a Wonderful Life
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MY PHILOSOPHICAL WORK
Forthcoming Work in Being and Place
Being and Place - A lean and logical plan and outline
Being and Place - Writing and Publishing Plan
An Editing and Publishing Plan
The revolution will neither be monetized nor academically peer reviewed ... and neither will I
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A Place of Joy and Learning - and Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Barriers to Actively Seeking Work
We are all of us much more beautiful than we are told
Truth, Justice and Love – My Hillsborough Statement
The e-Akademeia – aims of my Tutoring Business
Posts from 2021
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What are the Worst Years for an Aspie?
The Peter Critchley Design for Health and Happiness
Imagine Religion - and Politics
Queen - The Fifty Greatest Tracks
A Little More Conversation, a Little Less Action, Please
Environmentalism as Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism
In Defence of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful
Transcendent Standards or a world of pure contingency and arbitrariness
Essential Being, Being Essential
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