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I’ve finished the first draft of a novella with internet dating as its central theme and I’m back to considering the idea of dating profiles etc.   Alain Badiou’s ideas, already discussed in a previous post, were helpful in terms of ‘safety first love’ with the dating profile allowing us to pick and choose people prior to meeting them.  But its not just this ability to check up on someone anonymously that has me flustered.  I think its that we come to meeting the person with a prior knowledge we wouldn’t have access to otherwise and this colours the way we see them. The Philosopher’s MailRead More →

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Freedom’s just freedom right?  Well no actually.  Joe Gelonesi, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Philosopher’s Zone, spoke recently with political philosopher, Philip Pettit, and it appears the meaning of freedom has shifted over time and depending on your outlook this may not be a good thing. According to Pettit, Professor of Philosophy at ANU and author of Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World, freedom is not what it once was back in the day….and we are talking right back in the day of Republican Rome.  Since the rise of liberalism, freedom has come to represent an attitude of non-interference.  If a person can navigateRead More →

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In 2008, a conversation took place between philosopher, Alain Badiou and interviewer, Nicholas Truong at the Avignon Festival as part of the ‘Theatre of Ideas’ series. This conversation was later extrapolated on, translated into English and entitled In Praise of Love. I discovered this work while researching for a novella on online dating. There were reservations, you see. I felt an underlying brutality to this new system of love-seeking, more a ‘king hit’ from a street thug than the lovers’ embrace, but I could not put my finger on it, until In Praise of Love. Badiou calls it ‘a safety-first concept’ of love. In nominating traitsRead More →