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 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.…
by Chris Horner There’s a widespread belief that the world is really run by dark forces, or hidden actors we cannot see or know, but which operate like puppet masters somehow ‘behind the scenes’. On this view, only by a painstaking piecing together can we arrive at the truth about what is really going on.…
by Chris Horner Two Scenarios First scenario: you attempt to criticise, condemn or otherwise focus on an unjust regime, act of aggression, atrocity, or cruelty. An example: a school has been bombed and children have died. It is a war crime and you name it as such as an evil, criminal thing. Soon after the…
by Chris Horner Equality v Equity How should society go about the business of redistributing resources? Many people will be acquainted with the image featured at the top of this article. It is supposed to show the superiority of the notion of ‘equity’ – that is, giving people what they need to succeed, thus satisfying…
by Christopher Horner Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem on June 1st 1962, a little after midnight. He had been found guilty by an Israeli court of ‘crimes against the Jewish people’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. One of the reasons he is still remembered – apart from the sheer scale of the crimes committed by…
by Chris Horner It is everywhere: the production of words designed to promote the fiction that something positive and good is happening, even though it isn’t. It comes courtesy of the people you work for, the retail outlets you shop from, and the government organisations that regulate your life. An example: a large organisation develops…
by Chris Horner Among the books of the nineteenth century that have something important to say to us now Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) deserves a prominent place. It’s not the obvious contender for a popular read in the 21st century. He doesn’t make it easy for himself, if getting readers was…
by Chris Horner De gustibus non est disputandum —Roman Maxim How can I know what I think until I see what I say? —EM Forster When I first began to take photography seriously, as a practitioner as well as a viewer, I naturally discussed the activity with other photographers. It wasn’t long before I noticed…
by Chris Horner The political world is changing again. In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades, capitalism and the nation state is undergoing one of its periodic metamorphoses. The period of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘neoliberal progressivism’ – broadly progressive stances by many governments on issues of sexual choice, reproductive rights…
by Chris Horner This year marks the 200th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death in exile on the island of St Helena. And it was 206 years ago last June that his career came to a bloody end at Waterloo, with defeat at the hands of an allied army led by Britain’s Wellington and Prussia’s Blucher.…