The UN Happiness Conference last week looks to have been a fascinating event. The Prime Minister of Bhutan sent me a giant Willy Wonka-esque invitation, for which I’m grateful, but wouldn’t pay my air-fare, for which I’m lingeringly resentful (not … Continue reading
Paul Strohm was the speaker at our regular lunchtime seminar today and generously agreed to write up a version of his talk as a blog post too, ranging from St Augustine to Albert Camus, via Calvin, Dostoyevsky and Freud. Paul … Continue reading
Here’s a video of the recent RSA talk by the cultural historian and friend of the Centre, Roman Krznaric. Enjoy!
After the romantic excesses of February 14 last week, Dr Emily Butterworth of King’s College London, offers some Renaissance advice on how to write about love, inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s essay, ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’ (1588-1592). A frank … Continue reading
Sipping water or blowing your nose it’s hard not to realise the extent to which our emotions are sustained by commercial products. Kleenex tissues, in a campaign masterminded by J. Walter Thompson, claim to make possible “the cleansing of the … Continue reading
When did you last feel shame? Today? Yesterday? Last week? Last year? In my case, I reckon the answer is 1983. Now, there may be many reasons why I have felt no shame for the last twenty-nine years. It could … Continue reading
In our fourth post in Shame Week, Dr Katherine Angel of Warwick University’s Centre for the History of Medicine considers Steve McQueen’s new film, Shame. She argues that McQueen’s recent interviews characterising the work as ‘a film about sex addiction’ … Continue reading
Rebecca Kingston is Associate Professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and the editor of Bringing the Passions Back In: The Emotions in Political Philosophy (2008). She recently visited the Centre to give one of our lunch-time seminars, … Continue reading
As part of #shameweek, I want to sketch a theory of shame’s crucial place in liberalism and in critiques of liberalism. Secular liberalism, which was born in Athens in the fifth century BC, replaced the gods of Olympus with the … Continue reading
An intriguing new book about the philosophy of the emotions has just been published by Oxford University Press. It is not only a study of shame, but also a spirited defence of that emotion, co-authored by three philosophers: Julien Deonna, Raffaele Rodogno, … Continue reading