January  No meeting

21 February

Simon Cottle on: Ecological Dissimulation in a Dying Reporting the War in Ukraine

secure some empirical and analytical traction on these broader philosophical themes, it examines how and to what extent BBC news war reporting variously gives expression to or distances and dissimulates ecological awareness and concern. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began 24 February 2022 just over two months after the end of COP26, the UN Conference on Climate Change, (13.11.21). This was the latest UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties warning of catastrophic consequences if the world does not wake-up to the reality of climate change, a reality that is now having devastating impact on ecosystems and millions of lives around the planet (IPCC 2022). A conference in which the celebrated British naturalist, David Attenborough, opined, 'Is this how it is doomed to end?' And where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared 'Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: Either we stop it - or it stops us.' (Opening speech of COP26, Glasgow, 1.11.21). Not only is war a collective moral failure of humanity it is also an ecological outrage perpetrated on the planet, which, in the context of documented trajectories of civilizational and ecosystem collapse, exacerbates and accelerates those same global forces now converging in today's planetary emergency. To what extent does contemporary war reporting recognise and give expression to today's growing ecological sensibility and concerns for the wellbeing of all life on planet Earth? Or, to what extent and how is this ecological sensibility distanced and dissimulated in contemporary war reporting, and at what cost? And how can we explain this?

This presentation builds on earlier Tintern Philosophy Circle talks about our contemporary crisis world and sets out ideas of ecological consciousness in the context of today's 'world-in-crisis.' How do we explain this?

21 March

John Clarke on History of Modern Philosophy 3: Nineteenth Century, the Age of Progress

John introduced some of the main philosophical trends of the 19th century, including those of Hegel, Marx, Mill and Nietzsche, showing how they formed and responded to the 'age of progress' as the century has been called, arising especially out of the revolutionary period in France and the rapid advances in the sciences.

His approach in this series of talks on the history of philosophy, which he has employed in his teaching at various universities, is to explain philosophical issues and writings in their broad historical context rather than as timeless intellectual issues.

 18 April

Vanessa Dodd on 'Dreams: Some Philosophical Reflections'

Vanessa, an avid dreamer, surveyed the varied and often contrasting philosophical theories about the nature of dreams, their functions, uses, causes and properties, arguing for and against the proposition that we are such stuff as dreams, concluding with a speculative hypothesis of her own.

16 May 2023

 John Carke on Bertrand Russell and the Revolution in British philosophy in the 20th centur

This is the fourth episode in the History of Western Philosophy series, starting in early in the 20h century with the work of Bertrand Russell and others, and which came to be the dominant mode of philosophical thinking in Britain and the English-speaking world during the century.

20 June 2023

Bob Clarke on Early Greek Philosophy and Miltetus

The earliest Greek philosophers - Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes - lived in the city of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor in the 6th Century BCE . We have very limited records of their teachings, but we do know that, among other philosophical issues, they were concerned with a principle called the Arche - the fundamental substance out of which the whole world is created. We will survey what has been accepted (for some 2500 years!) regarding their philosophies and then investigate new perspectives on their thought that have been developed in recent decades.

18 July 2023 No meeting

15 August 2023 No meeting

21 September 2023 No meeting

17 October 2023 No meeting

21 November 2023

John Clarke on The lifeworld: Continental Philosophy from Existentialism to Postmodernism

After the last talk in this series which was about 20th century philosophy in Britain from Bertrand Russell onwards, we cross the Channel to something (almost) completely different with a look at the rise of Existentialist philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. the focus of which could be summed up as 'the lifeworld' with its emphasis on human freedom and the quest for meaning. Then we will look at reactions against this in the postmodern period which includes new feminist thinking and the deconstructive work of Foucault and Derrida.