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 When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. —The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford) No man is a hero to his valet. —proverb The highest act of reason…is an aesthetic act. —Holderlin (attrib) Sometimes it seems that growing up and learning things is one long process of disillusionment. Dis-illusion:…
by Chris Horner The world we live in is changing, and our politics must change with it. We are in what has been called the ‘anthropocene’: the period in which human activity is threatening the ecosystem on which we all depend. Catastrophic climate change threatens our very survival. Yet our political class seems unable to…
by Chris Horner I won that election —Donald J Trump The truth is out there —X files There is a story that Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, was in conversation with some German representatives during the Paris peace negations in 1919 that led to the Treaty of Versailles. One of the Germans said something…
by Chris Horner Two series have been streaming recently, to considerable success – The Queen’s Gambit (a Netflix miniseries, now concluded) and Succession (HBO, two series so far and more planned). They are interesting for a number of reasons – both for what they show, and perhaps more for what they do not, possibly cannot,…
by Chris Horner A Task for the Left ‘Freedom’ must be about the most popular term in the world of politics, and not only in that world. But what does it actually mean, in social and political terms? How should people who want to be broadly progressive understand it? Too often the Left finds it…
by Chris Horner Not long ago there was an article circulating on Facebook about ‘Hating the English’, originally published in a large circulation newspaper. The Irish author says something to the effect that once she thought it was just a few bad ones etc., but now she hates the lot of them. It’s been stimulated, I…
by Chris Horner In the presidential election of 2016, around 45% of adult eligible to vote in the USA did not vote. It isn’t disputed that voter suppression, disproportionately affecting people of colour, was one of the causes. Another seems to be a cynicism, or apathy about the process itself. And there may be other…
by Chris Horner Beauty is nothing more than the promise of happiness —Stendhal How can beauty promise happiness? And what kind of beauty would this be? What sort of happiness? Happiness and Beauty have been central issues for thinkers since antiquity, and the question of what they really are, and whether we should even prize…
by Chris Horner Just about everybody knows what tax is for, and why they need to pay it. Most do so, with varying degrees of reluctance. A few do all they can to avoid paying it, using legal, and sometimes illegal methods. There is a sense that those who do dodge paying tax are doing…
by Chris Horner There are some notions, ideas and arguments, that no matter how often they are exposed as fallacious, are rebutted and refuted, seem to recur again and again. Moral relativism is one of them.[1] Put simply, this is the view that one’s moral judgments are delimited by the culture or period in which…
by Chris Horner There are times when customary evils become outlandish and intolerable. Then there is a call for irreversible ethical change, a transformation of more than the way we judge this or that, times in which which old laws are struck down and new ones framed. I want to suggest that a change in…
by Christopher Horner It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked —Warren Buffett Buffett’s famous remark has usually been applied to the shock of the 2008 financial crisis: the over-leveraged, the under-financed, the chancers and the over-exposed in general were embarrassed when the tide went out and left…
by Christopher Horner If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner. —Jean-Paul Sartre We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for…
by Chris Horner The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Gramsci Does a crisis show us what we are ‘really like’? Whether it does or not, it has already been instructive to experience this one,…
by Chris Horner The political philosophy, and more importantly, political practice that took root in the wake of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ (say 1775-1848) was liberalism of various kinds: a commitment to certain principles and practices that eventually came to seem, like any successful ideology, a kind of common sense. With this, however, came a…
by Chris Horner In May 1919 the remains of a woman were fished from the Landwehr canal in Berlin. The three doctors available must have suspected the identity of the corpse, as they refused to perform a post mortem on it. Identification was in any case made by examination of the clothes on the body.…
by Christopher Horner We have it in our power to begin the world over again —Tom Paine How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes? —Dr Johnson That the Age of Revolution and Rights was also the Age of Slavery and Empire is well known. Less obviously, it…
by Chris Horner At the heart of French existentialism – and especially the version associated with its most famous representative, Jean Paul Sartre – was the notion of radical freedom. On this view, when we choose, we choose our values and thus what kind of person we are going to be. Nothing can prescribe to us…
by Chris Horner The question of how to program AI to behave morally has exercised a lot of people, for a long time. Most famous, perhaps, are the three rules for robots that Isaac Asimov introduced in his SF stories: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human…
by Chris Horner In my years in education I have regularly come across what I call the lightbulb fallacy: the view that people have degrees of brightness and that it is the job of education to measure the wattage of learners in order to find the best social sockets to plug them into. It is…