The Philosophers' Magazine

The fact that especially few women survive in a subject that attracts roughly equal numbers of male and female undergraduates suggests that, while bothsexes are equally drawn to philosophy, there is something about the discipline that is discouraging to women.

Philosophy has become more and more abstracted from people’s daily lives, so in a way, philosophers are a kind of joke in Britain. The only time they appearis in comedy and it seems to me really important to do something about this.

If you’re thinking ethically you ought to try to take the point of view from which you consider whether you could prescribe the action if you were in the position of all of those affected by it. I think that if you consider the situation of poverty and affluence, if you were really to put yourself in the position of the poor person and the affluent person, and ask yourself whether you could support the view that the affluent person doesn’t give anything to the poor, you couldn’t.

It would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that Rousseau believes that we should simply disregard what others think and depend entirely and narcissistically on our own evaluation of ourselves and our merits. Once self-love is loose in the world, it is an inescapable feature of our psychology. It is something that it is difficult to tame, but it has to be done.

A mistaken view of Africana philosophy is that it is parasitic on Western philosophy, and that it is so in a way that limits its legitimacy as an area of thought. This misconception is often alluded to, although not intended, in the phrase “philosophy and the black experience” or “philosophy and the Africana experience”.

Sometimes there’s this sense that if we don’t embrace a particular philosophy you’re going to be lost in this quagmire of conflicting viewpoints and moral relativism. I wanted to reveal what I’ve been calling an ethic of intellectual inquiry and political commitment, even if there’s not necessarily a consensus between all the philosophers in the film.

Now, it don't do to remake a perfectly good film and do a bad job of it. That can rob us of something important. It ain't the sequence of events that makes a good story, see, it's the ideas driving it. And if you ain't got that, what have you got? Know what I mean?

If Lecter is merely a psychotic, with no choice but to do what he does, then he is to be pitied, not blamed for his actions. As soon as you start pitying him, thespell is broken and he ceases to be mesmerising. If he can’t control himself, he appears to be much less powerful as a result.

Around these unstable, ill-defined, gaseous images, the film most daringly constructs multiple film-worlds. These are parallel, or subjective, or future film-worlds – sheets of time, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call them – narrative lines which refract over and around each other to create an almost crystalline form to the film. And these sheets of past, present, or future fluidly combine and twist: scenes shift with the swiftness of thought.

Dark comedies invite us to laugh at something which is, at least ostensibly, not funny at all. They take an act or event that would, under most descriptions or presentations, invite pity or anger, and give it characteristics that invite amusement. It is essential to the humour of the kidnapping in The King of Comedy that it is a kidnapping. The immorality of this event is crucial to its humour.

Something is happening which tears morality from its secure mooring and projects us into uncharted territory. All rules are suspended. We are reminded that no examining magistrate is present; this has now escalated to become a greater metaphysical absence, as the film develops its earlier reference to the murder of God. If God is dead, if God has willed and commanded his own death, what moral nightmare awaits us?

When I opened the first novel, Twilight, my impression was that I had gone back in time to an old fashioned world where women were seen as empty conduits of masculine desire and valued for their propensity to self-sacrifice alone. It drove me to take another look at The Second Sex, a founding text for feminist philosophy written by Simone de Beauvoir half a century ago.