These rants are a sequence of essays, written once a week. They are designed to both engage with a philosophical or political issue, and to link that issue with the current politics of the time. The aim is to broaden out current political debates, and make them jangle across a far larger canvas. However there is no attempt in this process to simply explain the events by the theories. On the contrary, the aim is throughout to set up a very flexible exchange between example and theory, and have each inform, commentate and partially create the other. Hence these rants would aim to be rather practical in their effect. They wish to allow one a different perspective of ideas and the world. A perspective that allows the mind other ways to think where and what it is (and what might follow from that thought). But also the rants might hope to show how oddly useful philosophy actually is. That is, how philosophy offers a treasure house of weirdness which when dressed down and repositioned, has an awful lot to tell us about our minds and our ways of thinking. However a note of caution needs to be sounded to those serious minded scholars out there. The rules of ranting demand that each rant is written from memory alone. They are not therefore an attempt at a scholarly appreciation of the philosophers involved. They hope to be far more playful than that, and only hope that their habitual misuses of ideas are justified within the worlds that that misuse opens up. The Rants’ plea then would be: For heaven’s sake do not use us as a crib sheet; but do use us to think with! You have nothing but your good sense to lose, and you have a universe to populate with new ideas. |