Mark Kingwell
Canadian philosopher who is professor of philosophy and associate chair at the University of Toronto's Department of Philosophy.
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Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.
Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.
We are capitalism made flesh.
War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.
All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.
I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.
Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.
Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.
How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?
We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.
We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.
Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.
But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only the first.
Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.
Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.
For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.
Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.
It is only through a devoted attention to the details of objects and faces in the modern urban scene, he argues, that the commodity fetish of capitalism can be effectively dispelled.
Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.
Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.
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