One should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without the paradox is like a lover without a feeling. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p 46
Paradox: a composite of the Greek ‘para’ (against or beyond) and ‘doxa’ (common belief or opinion); a paradox, informally, is a statement that goes against or beyond common sense; ‘this statement is a lie’ is a famous example of a paradox.
Professor James Williams gave a talk at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) on 17th April 2014 to accompany the exhibition of work by Navid Nuur. The transcript of his talk is available to download here.
Professor James Williams will be one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Hong Kong next month – ‘Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities’. Running from 9th to 12th June 2014, the conference has been organised by the Department of English Language & Literature, Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre, at the Hong Kong …
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Professor James Williams will be giving a series of talks in Paris in April and May 2014. The next talk on May 14th will be on ‘Duchamp transformations and the refinement of feedback by continental philosophy (with some examples from David Foster Wallace)’, at a workshop on ‘Machine and the five senses’, part of a …
7-8 May 2014 Acinemas Conference Acinemas: Aesthetics and Film in the Philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard. Visit the website
Professor James Williams will be giving a series of talks at Paris 8 University in April and May 2014. The second talk on April 29th will be on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of signs, as set out in Deleuze’s book ‘Proust et les signes’. The talks will be in French and held in room A028 at …
Everything we call base is a phenomenon due to gravity. Moreover the word baseness is an indication of this fact. . . . Queueing for food. The same action is easier if the motive is base than if it is noble. Base motives have in them more energy than noble ones. Problem: in what way …
Gravity: From the Latin gravitatem, ‘weight; heaviness; pressure’. According to Weil, gravity is the force governing human existence when and as we are directed by base virtues. It is characterised not only by attraction but also an intensity the closer one is to its source. Base virtues make it exceptionally more difficult for us to …
Read Professor James Williams’ paper from the inaugural workshop, titled Continental Philosophy? Oh, yes!