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 …
Read more “Deleuze conference in Hong Kong , 9-12 June 2014”
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!
The Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy (SCCP) marked its inauguration with an international workshop in which renowned philosophers discussed and debated new and exciting advances in their respective fields of research. Themes of discussion drew on such diverse fields as the philosophies of life, technology, and religion. Invited speakers included: Pierre Cassou-Nogues (Paris), Pascale Gillot …
Against the great error of thinking that our era (Europe) represents the highest human type. Instead: the men of the Renaissance were higher, as were the Greeks; in fact, perhaps we are at a rather low level: ‘understanding’ is not a sign of highest force but of thorough fatigue; moralisation itself is a ‘décadence’. Nietzsche, …
Nihilism: From the Latin nihil, meaning ‘nothing’. Nihilism is the radical negation of the meaning and value of life, its reduction to nothing. For many continental philosophers, following Nietzsche, nihilism signifies a state of crisis in contemporary European culture.