.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
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The label 'gloomy pessimist' fixes on Schopenhauer's weakest side. His real thesis is more disquieting: the source of our unhappiness may not be what the world does to us but the fact that we must always be wanting something. And from there a road runs to compassion.
The New School for Social Research is giving Stanley Cavell two days on 30 and 31 October. The focus falls on his writings about art — and on the constitutive part that scepticism about other minds plays in his reading of it. Alice Crary and Jay Bernstein are among the speakers.
Iulia Nistor's new book treats horror films not as a genre to be catalogued but as a means of philosophical thought. Her question is why anyone should choose to watch the thing that frightens him. The answer runs from Aristotle's catharsis to Kant's sublime and Kristeva's abject.
Michel Serres was born on 1 September 1930; Stanley Cavell on 1 September 1926. One brought philosophy together with science and myth, the other with cinema and ordinary language. Two thinkers born on the same day did the same work by different routes: opening philosophy's border with something from outside it.
Hermann von Helmholtz was born on 31 August 1821; his account of perception as a system of signs took Kant into the laboratory. On the same day in 1867, Baudelaire, who gave the word 'modernité' its present sense, died in Paris. Both were born in 1821, and both asked what the modern eye sees.
Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, brings his new film 'The Basics of Philosophy' to the 83rd Venice Film Festival, where it screens out of competition. Martin Scorsese is among the producers. The title invites a question: why would a box-office director take philosophy as his subject?
The ethicist Kathryn Lawson calls Arendt, Levinas and Weil as witnesses against Nolan's Odyssey: Homer's Odysseus feels no guilt for his violence, and that is not a defect but a warning. Fitting the hero with a conscience cuts away the story's ethical depth.
He was a professor at twenty-three, was overshadowed by Hegel, and was then forgotten. Yet over the past thirty years Schelling's philosophy of nature and his essay on freedom have been read again. The reason is simple: his was the first great attempt to think the human being without placing it outside nature.
Love, loneliness, status anxiety and the search for meaning. The Anglo-Swiss writer is the best-known figure taking philosophy beyond the bounds of academic specialism and applying it to ordinary concerns. His question is as old as Socrates': how should we live?
