Is there such a thing as an “emotional truth”? We can answer ‘yes’ to that on two counts. The first is simple: one can say “he is in love” or “he is grieving” whereby we express our assessment of someone’s current emotional disposition based, say, on observation of their behaviour or on what they have …
Author Archives: ashleyg60
The Age of Enlightenment
There are those that claim that we’re still living in the Age of Enlightenment, that through science and rationality, the human person can achieve a kind of ‘perfectability’ in terms of progress, tolerance and democracy. The Enlightenment is traditionally seen as ‘beginning’ in the eighteenth century, philosophically speaking, as a result of the scientific breakthroughs …
Post-Literate Society?
This is a phrase that I’ve heard bandied about quite frequently in the past three years. The idea seems to be that reading is now considered a “chore”, as well as something that is “too complex” for young people to grasp. It requires too much concentration, too much time, takes up too much space in …
Social Media and Exposure
One of the benefits of SM is the ways in which it enables people, companies and governments to be exposed as corrupt by those labelled “citizen journalists”. SM gives us alternative representations/re-presentations of events, and is used to highlight events which receive no coverage whatsoever from “mainstream media”. At least, this was the case in …
The Habitual Repetition of Form
The density of the visual image, its lack of thoughtful space, also conceals the way in which spectators who go on to become “pseudo-makers” – this term distinguishes them from what we can call real makers, those who possess a knowledge of the techniques and forms that they are using – are assimilated into visual …
Social Media and Reality TV
This is really part 2 of the previous entry, the retreat into visual culture. However, what the appearance of the category “Reality TV” (henceforth RTV) does is fulfil the desire of people to see people like themselves represented onscreen, although this results in a circularity. RTV, according to historical lore, began with Peter Robinson’s series, …
The ‘Retreat’ into Visual Culture?
We’re are now told that we’re living in a “visual culture” which, from one perspective is rather odd because we’ve always lived in a visual culture: I see, therefore, whatever I see and I exist. One can argue that for something to exist it has to be seen by someone – which is a standard …
Surviving Morality
One can interpret this in two ways: firstly, can morality continue to exist in a society that treats it as an “add-on”, rather than a set of principles which should (in some sense or other) ‘dictate’ our actions and, secondly, is it possible to negotiate one’s way through a morality (moralities?) whose principle concern seems …
Human Progress?
We seem to be living in an age of what might be called “renewed despair”. No matter how great the scandal – and the Epstein files are surely the greatest, hugest scandal of contemporary times – it passes by, replaced in the rolling news cycle by the next “big thing”. This is partly due to …
Social Media and the Aristotelian Condition
Is there such a thing as “human progress”? With each epoch does the human person become, in some sense, ‘better’ or is this idea mere self-deception? In the current political climate of populism, which emphasises hatred, bigotry and exclusionary self-interest, there seem obvious, but despairing, answers to these questions; yet these are the conclusions that …
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