For this week's newsletter, I offer you three varieties of ecstasy. First, the historical variety. I interviewed Bernd Bosel, a philosopher and historian of 'enthusiasm', and we discussed how the Enlightenment tried to marginalize and pathologise ecstatic experience. Try a dose of that here.
Read MoreAs you know, I’ve been researching the Welsh revival of 1904 and, more broadly, the place of ecstasy in modern culture. On Tuesday, I drove to Cwmbran in the south of Wales, where something called the Welsh Outpouring has broken out. I wondered if the Outpouring was the beginning of a new Welsh revival, so off I went to Cwmbran, like a storm-chaser.
Read MorePublic anger over revelations that governments snoop on our internet activity comes partly from a sense that our online selves are not entirely in our control. The more networked we are, the more our selves are ‘out there’, online, made public and transparent to a million eyes.
Read MoreNext week, I’m off to Wales. First, I’m going to Cwmbran, where something is happening called ‘the Welsh Outpouring’. In April, when a young pastor called Richard Taylor was preaching, the congregation felt filled with the Holy Spirit, there were tears, shouts, groans, and this started to happen every evening.
Read MoreIn my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from various emotional problems, which I'd inflicted on myself by messing around with LSD. My recovery began when I fell off a mountain, while skiing in Norway in 2001. I fell 30 foot, broke my leg, knocked myself unconscious, and when I came to, I saw a bright white light and I felt filled with love. Weird huh?
Read MoreLaura Marling’s new album, Once I Was An Eagle, is that rare pleasure - an album to which you listen all the way through, and then want to start again at the beginning. There are only one or two albums like that a year, for me at least. Fleet Foxes’ debut album was one such.
Read MoreFive years ago, the British government launched a mental health initiative called Improving Access for Psychological Therapy (IAPT), which hugely expanded the provision of talking therapies within the National Health Service, with the aim of getting therapy for depression and anxiety to just under one million adults a year.
Read MoreI've a long article in Aeon magazine this week, looking at Improving Access for Psychological Therapy (IAPT), which is the first ever provision of talking therapy on a mass scale by a government. Before IAPT, the NHS spent just 3% of its mental health budget on talking therapy.
Read MoreAt the moment I'm researching the cultural practices of ecstasy in the 20th century, which has given me the excuse to read some fine books on the history of pop music. The latest is Matthew Collin’s Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, first published way back in 1997 and since updated. It's a bravura piece of historical journalism.
Read MoreWhile I was writing Philosophy for Life, I lived with three friends in a church in North London. We discovered that our land-lady, who we never met, was Sister Bliss, the DJ and one third of the dance supergroup Faithless.
Read MoreLast weekend I was asked to come and talk about my experience doing the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge. I was happy to agree, as I’d enjoyed Alpha, and my ego is always flattered to be asked to speak.
Read MoreToday'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:
Read MoreSimon Critchley, an English philosopher at the New School in New York, has suggested that all philosophy is an attempt to deal with two disappointments: religious disappointment, or the loss of faith; and political disappointment, or the search for justice. In his most recent book, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, he attempts to put these disappointments behind him, and work out a relationship between religion and politics.
Read MoreI'm reading Simon Critchley's most recent book, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology. It's an interesting read, not least because I had no idea that the critical theory movement beloved of Critchley (Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Badiou, Lacan, Agamben, Eagleton and so on) has taken a 'religious turn'. Apparently so.
Read MoreI’m in Holland again, this time in Utrecht, where yesterday I did a three-hour workshop at the University of Humanistic Studies. It was gratifying to have lots of bright students scrutinising my ideas, though also grueling in so far as the students very intelligently saw the limitations of Stoic philosophy.
Read MoreAs regular readers will know, I am in the process of exploring Christianity and my relationship to it. I've never really been a Christian - I decided at 16 it didn't make sense to me and was never confirmed - but I have always believed in God, or at least, in a benevolent power or consciousness that pervades the universe.
Read MoreI managed to get out of bed to run a London Philosophy Club event last week, where the philosopher John Gray gave an interesting talk about his new book,The Silence of Animals. He seemed a very nice guy, who gave up his evening for free, and the audience (the biggest we've ever had at an LPC meeting) seemed on the whole to like his humility and humour, bar one lady who said 'if I'd written your book it would have been very different', and then left!
Read MoreIt’s been five years since the launch of the government’s flagship mental health programme, Improving Access for Psychological Therapies (IAPT).
Read MoreHow do you...fill your days?’ =My editor was looking at me with a hint of concern, in a cafe on Portland Street. She was worried I was losing my edge. It had been almost a year since my first book had come out, and still I hadn’t started working on another.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe Catholic church has a new pope! Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio this week became Pope Francis I, the first non-European pope. The first BRIC pope. He sounds like a man of humility and asceticism, who travels on budget airlines - Lord knows that is a trial of the flesh.
Read MoreI'm reading Europe's Inner Demons, Norman Cohn's excellent book on witches and the witch-hunts of the middle and early modern ages. I've been prompted to do this because I'm on the Alpha Course at the moment, and enjoying it, but have been particularly challenged by the Course's lesson on the Devil.
Read MoreThis week, I traveled to Durham to visit my godmother, who has just been made principal of one of the colleges of Durham University. She invited me to high table at one of their formal black-tie dinners, and then asked me to give a little after-dinner speech.
Read MoreI'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:
Read MoreIn the last few days, I’ve had two wonderful, if slightly contradictory, experiences. One was going on the Alpha Weekend, the other was going last night to see the Book of Mormon. I enjoyed them both immensely.
Read MoreWe've all hallucinated during sex, haven't we? Or...is it just me?! Well I have anyway, on a couple of occasions. Once was back in 1996. I had just left university, and broken up with my girlfriend in the clumsiest and most insensitive way imaginable.
Read MoreI've just been at a three-day seminar at the Institute for Government, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to help academics learn how to influence public policy. The seminar brought together 15 academics in disciplines ranging from literary criticism to design and urban planning.
Read MoreYesterday, Tony Little, the headmaster of my old school Eton College, gave evidence to the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Social Mobility at a special summit on ‘character and resilience’. These traits have been outlined by the Committee as the ‘missing link’ in social mobility.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreToday, some archeologists excavated the skeleton of Crookback Dick, also known as Richard III:
Read MoreThe history of popular religions can be compared to the natural history of species. Sometimes a new species arrives in an environment, and a fierce battle ensues with the native species. They may also interbreed, as the first homo sapiens interbred with earlier species of humans.
Read MoreThis week I’d like to examine the latest attempt to teach young people how to flourish in schools, via a new randomised controlled trial of a new Personal and Social Health Education curriculum, which is being launched in 30 English schools this autumn.
Read MoreDo you know any good poo and wee stories? This is the question that confronts me as I arrive at Windsor Hill Wood, an open-door community run by the writer Tobias Jones and his wife Francesca, in Somerset. They live there with their three children - Benedetta is eight, Grace is five, and Leo is three - and there are five beds for guests.
Read MoreI'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:
Read MoreTo talk about David Bowie, first we need to talk about Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher who, near the beginning of the 19th century, recognised that rationalism was undermining the mythical foundation of society - Christianity - without putting any new myths in its place.
Read MoreHappy New Year! Tis the season to be wary - wary of alcohol, sugar, cigarettes, carbohydrates, and all the other stuff that makes life bearable. What have you given up for New Year? Me, I’m off the fags, again, and taking exercise in an attempt to lose a bit of weight.
Read MoreAngie Hobbs came and spoke at the London Philosophy Club earlier this month. She's an expert on Plato, and in her talk she used Platonism as a way of making sense of last year’s riots. She noted that many media commentators called the rioters ‘shameless’. This wasn’t true at all, she said. The rioters had a sense of shame and honour, it was just warped, or misdirected.
Read MoreThere are few areas of our society going through such bewildering change at the moment as higher education. It is a difficult and distressing time for academics and students alike. But this upheaval also means we have a rare opportunity not merely to defend the status quo but to experiment with new models of higher education.
Read MoreOur 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.
Read MoreThis is a weird time to be alive. To live now is to have the occasional consciousness that our planet is heading for a monumental shift in climate, which is likely to make existence much harder for billions of people in the future.
Read MoreHere are some pics of me speaking at Woking Library:
Read MoreHere's my AHRC report on grassroots philosophy via fancy 'turn the page' technology. Thanks for the QMUL creative services team for putting it together. Check it out!
This is a brilliant talk and a brilliant animation.
Read MoreI was slightly surprised to see that Julian Baggini had used his column in the Independent to make some criticisms of 'Stoic Week', part of a project at Exeter University with which I'm involved. When you think of all the serious things happening in the world at the moment, from extreme weather to the war in Gaza, it seems odd to use your column in a national newspaper to criticise a project which, taken all together, is in my opinion a small but positive thing within the philosophical landscape.
Read MoreWe’re coming to the end of Stoic Week. People all over the world have been practicing Stoic exercises and reflecting on Stoic ideas this week, thanks to this wonderful initiative, launched by a young post-grad at Exeter University called Patrick Ussher. Some of Patrick’s students have been sharing their thoughts on the exercises via YouTube.
Read MoreI'm increasingly aware of two things: firstly, I can be a bit of a tub-thumping evangelist for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), as it worked for me; and secondly, the Improved Access for Psychotherapies (IAPT) government programme is far from perfect, and we need to look at how to improve it.
Read MoreBig day today. I’ve finally finished my report on grassroots philosophy groups, which you can download here: Connected Communities- Philosophical Communities.
Read MoreMy publishers in Holland, Ten Have, are doing an amazing job. They recently launched a poster campaign across the country, and also lined up lots of great interviews for me, including a four-page interview in de Volksrant, and another interview in Trouw.
Read MoreHere are my top ten tips for recovering from mental illness. Tell me any really good tips I've missed out in the comments. They're not commandments, just what worked for me in recovering from social anxiety and minor depression - feel free to disagree. And although I don't mention medication, because I personally didn't use it, I know lots of people find that a helpful part of the recovery process - and an essential one if you suffer from a serious psychotic condition.
Read MoreThere's an interview with me in de Volksrant, a Dutch newspaper, published today. The very nice interviewer asked me about an experience I described right at the end of the book, which was sort of a near-death experience I think.
Read MorePaul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, The Master, tells the story of drifter Joaquin Phoenix’s relationship with the head of a New Age sect, which looks suspiciously like Scientology. The group, called The Cause, aims (like Scientology) to clear its members of the karmic traces of their past lives, and return them to their inherent perfection. They do this by hypnotising their members to retrace their past incarnations, or by subjecting them to a b
Read MoreRick Lewis was working in the laboratory of British Telecom when he decided, just over 20 years ago, to launch a philosophy magazine for non-academics, called Philosophy Now. He tells me about the early days, how grassroots philosophy has grown, how he met his wife Anja Steinbauer, who runs Philosophy For All, and where he sees the 'movement' going.
Read MoreThere was an article in Morgenbladet, the Norwegian newspaper, on philosophy clubs last month. It's not online yet but here are two beautiful photos from the story. Both are by Ellen Lande Gossner - thanks to Ellen for letting me use these photos in my report on philosophy groups!
Read MoreI'm writing this from a cafe in Antwerp, at the end of my first mini book tour abroad, having spent the last week doing talks and interviews in Amsterdam and Antwerp. My Dutch publisher, Regine, has been putting a lot into the promotion here - there’s even going to be a poster campaign around the country.
Read MoreI got to Amsterdam on Monday, for the launch of the Dutch edition of the book. Regine, my publisher, showed me the edition on the train from the airport. It has a beautiful colour reproduction of Raphael's School of Athens on the inside cover:
Read MoreThey call me Jules 'one shot' Evans.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I organized a seminar (my first!) at Queen Mary, University of London, in its beautiful Octagon Room, about community philosophy, bringing together 20 or so practitioners in the field, who had a combined experience of over three centuries in grassroots philosophy. Here are some videos from the seminar:
Read MoreThere's a new spirit of self-help and mutual improvement blowing through public health policy. I first felt its breeze in Scotland's national mental health strategy, which was published in August, and which made much of its 'person-centred approach' to mental health in Scotland.
Read Moreaul Doran is one of the founders of Philosophy in Pubs (PIPs), which is the biggest network of community philosophy groups in the UK, with around 40 PIPs across the UK, including 14 in Merseyside, where PIPs began. Here he talks about how PIPs started, how to run a PIPs group, and how he sees community philosophy developing in the future.
Read MoreTonight, Channel 4 is showing the hypnotist and illusionist Derren Brown's Apocalypse. The show involves Brown hypnotising a man into believing that civilisation has collapsed after a meteor shower - an illusion enhanced with various actors and special effects (including, if the trailer is to be believed, zombies!)
Read MoreThanks to A Very Good Company for organising a great event.
Read MoreRoman Krznaric is the author of two popular books that came out this year - The Wonderbox: Curious histories of how to live and How to Find Fulfilling Work - and is also one of the founding faculty members of the School of Life, which teaches the art of living to its clientele.
Read MoreSad to hear of the death of Paul Kurtz, philosopher and arguably the founder of the modern Skeptic movement, yesterday. As it happens, I am writing today about Kurtz in my report on modern grassroots philosophy movements.
Read MoreHip hop and Philosophical Inquiry
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