This week I finished watching the new PBS documentary series, The Vietnam War, made by Ken Burns and Lynne Novick. It's a massive piece of work - 18 hours of footage from the last war when American journalists were allowed to roam pretty much wherever they wanted on the battlefield, and when presidents recorded their private conversations. You've never seen a war so close.

This week, I read an interesting book that came out at the start of this year about the Black Lives Matter movement, called They Can't Kill Us All, by Wesley Lowery. It tells the story of one of the defining protest movements of this decade, which shone a light (or, rather, a phone camera) on American police's excessive use of force against black people.

Arambol is a beach in the north of Goa, an old hippy hang out full of wizened old hippies and nubile young hipettes. Every night, there is a drumming circle as the sun sets. Last night, I danced in the circle, along with 30 or so other people, and worked up a sweat jacking my body to the syncopations, feeling my self dissolve to the beat. It was very pleasurable.

Like a lot of people, I've been scrambling to make sense of the Trump victory and what it says about public attitudes in the US and western culture generally. I've spent this week researching the alt-right movement and reading some of its literature.

I was planning to escape Brexit Britain by moving to America for a few years. Shit. So then, the day after the election, I tried to buy a Playstation Virtual Reality set. For real. That was my exit plan. Charlie Brooker seems to think it’s good, judging by his tweets.

I'm researching ecstatic experiences for a book coming out next year. One chapter is on sex and ecstasy. There's not much research on this topic  - hardly any in fact - so I need your help! Would you fill in this survey - it's very brief,  completely anonymous, and would help me enormously. Thanks!

I finally saw Get Out last night, and loved it. The film was laugh-out-loud funny, scary, and helped me somewhat imagine what it's like to be a black man walking through a white suburb, or a black man talking to a white police officer. How on your guard you need to be, the feeling of constantly being in enemy territory. Get out! But where can you escape to?

Yesterday evening I went to a demonstration at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain. This was the first time I've been to such an occasion - I'm not really into psychics, seances, ouija, Tarot, all that jazz. But I've been reading the work of a pioneering late Victorian psychologist, Frederic Myers, and he was very into all of that. I'll write more about him later this week.

This Wednesday, at 9pm, a rare event is taking place: the BBC is showing a TV programme about philosophy. Yes, a philosophy TV programme! Rarer than a blue moon or a Scottish Labour MP. Classicist Bettany Hughes (that's her on the left) presents a three-part show on BBC 4 called Genius of the Ancient World.

I'm interested in companies and organizations that have a higher purpose than profit. Here's an example - indie publisher Galley Beggar Press, set up in 2012 by Eloise Millar and her partner Sam Jordison, with bookseller Henry Layte who moved onto other projects in 2013. For a little company, Galley Beggar punches way above its weight - in the last twelve months, it published Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, which won the Bailey's prize for women's fiction, and Francis Plug's How To Be A Public Author, which was a big commercial hit.

At the beginning of Philosophy for Life, I talk about Raphael's famous mural of the School of Athens, and imagine getting a free ticket to study there. Well, this week, I got to join the school! The Idler Academy arranged a photo shoot on the steps of St Paul's, with various British thinkers and philosophers.

This week, I read Abraham Maslow’s 1964 little book, Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences. It’s only 100 pages long, but something of a classic, and anticipates the contemporary interest in the science of spiritual experience that’s apparent in, for example, Sam Harris’ new book (which I will review shortly).

I'm doing a Philosophy for Life workshop for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, which will be interpreted in sign language. It's happening next Monday, July 14, at 7pm, in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place.

Do you want to make a living practicing philosophy beyond academia, but not sure how? I'm organizing a seminar on practical philosophy on the evening of May 22 in London, bringing together people practicing philosophy in the community, in adult education, in companies, in prisons, in schools and in the NHS.

Excited to be launching the Philosophy for Life course this week - tomorrow at Manor Gardens, a mental health charity in North London; then on Thursday at Saracens rugby club; then on Friday at Low Moss prison. I've been having fun making some material for the course today, including this poster and a 'Deidre's Photo Casebook'-style montage called 'Socrates' Case-Book'. I'm hoping to launch the course for other companies and organizations later this year.

I like this Vice documentary about the Ministry of Drunken Glory, an ecstatic Christian movement in Minnesota.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

This is a guest post by Julia Kalmund from Munich

Ain't this cool? An illustration of one of my talks, from the journal of Lou Niestadt, the talented Dutch writer and illustrator, who came to one of my talks at the Happinez festival. Thanks so much, Lou, I love it!

I went to the Proms last night, and saw a wonderful performance of Les Illuminations, Britten's musical rendition of Rimbaud's poems, by the singer Ian Bostridge. It was the first time I've come across Rimbaud's verse, I'm embarrassed to say, and I loved it.

This is the second part of a piece, the first part is here.

Max Weber was what William James would call a ‘sick soul’ - by which I mean that, like James and Tolstoy, he was subject to depressions, and constantly asked himself if what he did had any positive meaning or value. The difference between him and these other two writers is that they emerged from their acute depressive crises by turning to God. Weber, by contrast, turned to science.

I keep coming back to this amazing lecture by Max Weber, which he gave in 1918, two years before he died, called Science as a Vocation. In it, he talks about the polytheism of modernity, how various gods and demons ‘strive to gain power over our lives’, and we have to decide which god to serve, and obey ‘the demon which holds the very fibres of his life’.

Here's the psychologist William James, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience, on the transformative power of forgiveness, tenderness and non-violence:

Hi, here's a correction regarding a quote in Philosophy for Life (the correction has already been made in the new edition of the book). In chapter eight, I misquoted an interview by Werner Erhard (the founder of erhard seminars training) taken from the wonderful Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self.

Today's the launch day of the new pocket-book edition of Philosophy for Life!  It's smaller, slimmer and yellower than the first edition, so easily fits in your pocket like an ancient handbook! It's also cheaper. But for a few lucky readers, it will be entirely free.I have five free copies to give away, to the first five people to email me the answers to the questions below at jules dot evans at mac dot com:

Here is a photo of me at the Night of Philosophy in Amsterdam, two Fridays ago. I was pretty ill with the flu - I think that podium was the only thing holding me up! I'm doing a 'sermon' in Utrecht this Sunday evening, by the way. Details here.

In this series of posts, I'm going to explore a figure who appeared to me in my dreams when I was about 20 and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'm going to suggest that this figure helps us unlock one of the functions of the arts - to hold a mirror up to a civilisation and show it all that it's forgotten or left out.

From Carlo Ginzberg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:

I'm enjoying Virginia Nicholson's book, Among The Bohemians, with its tales of bohemian experiments in living at the beginning of the 20th century. I particularly enjoyed David Garnett's account of the strange love triangle between the poet Robert Graves, his mistress the poet Laura Riding, and the young poet Geoffrey Phibbs:

Last night was the first session in the new Philosophy For Life course at Queen Mary, University of London. It was a full-house, with the Lock-Keeper's Cottage proving a great venue, and just about fitting everyone in. The audience was roughly one third undergrads, one third postgrads, and one third members of the public. Huge thanks to Rupert Jones for helping me out. Below are some photos from the event.

Today, some archeologists excavated the skeleton of Crookback Dick, also known as Richard III:

I'm reading John Carey's book, The Intellectual and the Masses, and enjoying it. I came across this awful review of the book by Roger Kimball, the cultural conservative, who completely fails to see the book's merits. In it, he quotes Hannah Arendt approvingly:

Here are some nice pics of the Brandstof / School of Life event in Amsterdam a fortnight ago, by the Brandstof photographer. More here.

Our lives are economies of pleasure, made of habitual ways of trying to feel good. If we want to change ourselves we have, as it were, to reform our habitual structures of pleasure and build new structures. We must change the ways that we get pleasure, and perhaps deny ourselves pleasure in the habitual forms in which we get it, in order to get pleasure in new ways.

Here are some pics of me speaking at Woking Library: