bigpicture
Film and debate | |
'Waking Life' |
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| The Paradise | Date: Monday 29th March 2010 |
Showing of Richard Linklater’s animated adventure in the meaning of consciousness with comment and discussion Big Ideas-style.
Details »centrallondon event
Does Education Need Theories? |
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| Speaker: Prof Paul Standish | Date: Tuesday 30th March 2010 |
Paul Standish invites us to consider philosophical perspectives on the theories that drive much education policy.
Details »recentblogging
Religious Programming, Secularism and Bad Arguments | |
| The National Secular Society put out an alarming press release last week insisting that the "BBC must not become an evangelical wing of the Church of England". Leaving aside whether the C of E now has wings, how great is this risk and how do the NSS's arguments stack up? | |
| Posted on 2010-02-17 04:35:38 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Care Needed When Campaigning With Indexicals | |
| Just a quick note on the Conservatives' latest election poster. It's not that it's negative: I'm fine with negative campaigning, and I think the Tories, having been in opposition for a long time now, have every right to score points off the incumbent administration's record. | |
| Posted on 2010-02-15 04:50:22 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Risk and Research | |
| Mary Beard's latest Don's Life column refers to the current culture of risk aversion in university research funding. As someone who's putting together a funding application for the ESRC (with almost zero chance of success, I should add) her words seem absolutely right to me: the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you've already done | |
| Posted on 2010-02-15 07:18:28 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Emancipation from What by Whom? | |
| I've been reading a fair bit of radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux etc) of late and seeing the word "emancipation" so many times that it started sticking out of the page and looking wrong. Then I read something in, of all places, Huddleston & Pullum that I think made sense of it for me. | |
| Posted on 2009-12-18 09:52:44 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Coming up in 2010 | |
| We've got some great speakers and topics scheduled for 2010. The calendar is filling up fast and here's a taste of what we've got planned. | |
| Posted on 2009-11-14 12:11:06 in SitRep | |
An hallucinogenic lecture on London history | |
| Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane will be putting on another performance of Align on 22 January 2010 at the Bridewell Theatre in London. | |
| Posted on 2009-11-14 12:39:55 in SitRep | |
Reminder: What is psychogeography today? | |
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Rich Cochrane will be giving a talk about pychogeography at Housmans Bookshop tomorrow.
Where: 5 Caledonian Road, King's Cross, London N1 9DX
When: Saturday 7 November
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| Posted on 2009-11-06 09:13:22 in SitRep | |
Deptford Pastoral | |
| Yesterday we walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne River in South East London, recording our impressions as we went. | |
| Posted on 2009-11-01 08:14:11 in This Sentence No Verb | |
The Greenwich Foot Tunnel | |
| Back in the summer Clare, her brother Mark and I visited the foot tunnel to take some photographs. There had been sometimes over-egged stories about the tunnel's scheduled closure for works over the next year and our main intention was to document some of the details of the fabric of the place, not knowing how much might be "improved" when it re-opened. | |
| Posted on 2009-10-26 09:21:22 in This Sentence No Verb | |
A date for your diary | |
| This year's Big Ideas Christmas Social will be held on Tuesday 15th December. You probably don't want to think about Christmas festivities yet, but just take a moment to put this date in your diary and then you can forget about it all until December. | |
| Posted on 2009-10-18 06:29:24 in SitRep | |
What is psychogeography today? | |
| Rich Cochrane will be giving a talk about pychogeography at Housmans Bookshop, London's premier radical bookstore, at 5pm on Saturday 7 November. Admission is free. | |
| Posted on 2009-10-18 09:09:40 in SitRep | |
Get hooked up with a Greek | |
| Kind of like a philosophical dating agency, this system from Mark Vernon finds your perfect match in ancient Greek philosophy. I've been matched with Zeno of Citium who, given the stoic | |
| Posted on 2009-10-18 11:01:40 in nathan @ big ideas | |
Is the Theism Debate a Class Conflict? | |
| I ask because Andrew Brown has claimed it is in his CiF blog, and atheism campaigner Ariane Sherine has strongly disagreed. CiF Belief is an engine that runs on this debate, but it's an angle I hadn't thought of before so I thought it was worth chewing over. | |
| Posted on 2009-10-11 10:34:02 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Modernism As Coping Mechanism; Postmodernism As Shopping | |
| Reading yet again that the fractured forms of the twentieth century avant gardes were a response to the traumas of the first world war, I'm moved to wonder (a) why anyone thinks this is worth saying, since everyone knows it, and (b) why anyone thinks it's right. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-20 12:35:09 in This Sentence No Verb | |
An Ackroydian pub crawl | |
| Back by popular demand, Robert Kingham is reprising his London pub crawl inspired by the writings of Peter Ackroyd on 24 October. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-20 05:48:28 in SitRep | |
It's Just A Theory | |
| I've heard the phrase "just a theory" applied in a few different contexts in recent weeks and thought it might be worth teasing out what we mean by "a theory" and what that little modifier "just" might mean. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-19 14:21:03 in This Sentence No Verb | |
The book-free library | |
| I'm sitting in the new Shepherds Bush Library. Modern libraries don't really do books. Books are certainly knocking around the place, but you get the sense that they serve as waiting room literature rather than the core purpose of the place. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-07 13:12:36 in nathan @ big ideas | |
The Hirst-Cartrain Incident | |
| As far as I can tell, here's what happened. Last year, a teenager calling himself (or possibly herself) Cartrain made some collages that included images of work by artist Damian Hirst. Somehow or other, they ended up on the 100artworks site. Hirst was not amused. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-06 16:02:16 in This Sentence No Verb | |
On Caroline Bergvall and Visual Poetry | |
| Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation I just discovered a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading "Via", a poem composed entirely of English translations of the first line of Dante's Divine Comedy. | |
| Posted on 2009-09-04 06:31:04 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Rich's Oulipo Laboratory | |
| This Sunday, 30 August, Rich Cochrane will be running a highly interactive session on Oulipo techniques for writers at the Treehouse Gallery in Regent’s Park. He’ll encourage participants to experiment with some classic surrealist and Oulipean ideas, create a ‘pataphysical encyclopaedia, solve literary puzzles and write collaborative texts. | |
| Posted on 2009-08-29 03:22:40 in SitRep | |
forthcomingevents
27th April 2010
John Worrall presents Just A Theory – Can There Be Certainty In Science?
Details »
25th May 2010
Jonathan White presents Partisanship
Details »
30th June 2010
Julian Baggini presents Do Thought Experiments Tell Us Anything?
Details »