Material for thought

In his book “Vinyl Leaves, Walt Disney World and America”, Stephen M. Fjellman analyses Disney World and how it incarnates a postmodern society based on consumerism. Here is a summary of his thoughts.

The Tour Eiffel from the World's Fair of 1900

I’ve read recently the excellent book from Jay Winter “Dreams of Peace and Freedom – Utopian Moments in the 20^th Century“. It is part of my curatorial homework for the exhibition “Living the Dream of Modernity” that I’m preparing to launch very soon. Here is a summary.

Random innovations interesting to look at in terms of philosophy:

• Find Out What People Want By Taking It Away From Them: Is the customer the master or the slave?
• Tracking one’s sex life.: A very taboo subject. How do people manage their sex calendars? Can it be online as all the rest? Probably…
• Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019: the digital world interwoven with reality, and more human. But what if the opposite happens? If reality gets interwoven with digital world, and less human?
• Our life will finally look like the 70′s sci-fi movies!

Education was under scrutiny yesterday at the Mary Ward center. The debate, introduced and chaired by Anja Steinbauer from pfa London, was indeed fundamental. What is the value of education, is it formative in the sense that it changes your nature, does it make you a better person or citizen? And how to judge if an education is successful?

European parliament: contemporary symbol of institutionalized debate

This Saturday was held the Joe McCarney Memorial Conference at the London knowledge lab. It was organized by the Marx and philosophy society in honor of one of their lost co-founder. Here is an analysis of the first speech given by Kai Nielsen ‘Emancipatory Social Science: McCarney and Levine’.

I would sadly not be able to comment much on the content of the speech as I lacked the prerequisite knowledge on Marx’s philosophy. Except rare references to real situations, all the discourse was built on positions to other authors’ theories. This led me to think why, and more in general how a philosophical debate is constructed.