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 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…
by Chris Horner To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play. —Nietzsche Freud is supposed to have claimed that the two key things for happiness in life are work and love. If he did, he should have added a third: play. It’s this that Nietzsche…