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Professor Carlos Eire grapples with the past, present and eternal future with the help of Meister Eckhart, St Augustine, Eusebio Nieremberg, Kurt Vonnegut and Milan Kundera. All living beings are seeking a divine consciousness, he says.

  • Carlos Eire on Time and Eternity

    The historian takes us from St Augustine to Milan Kundera in an attempt to pin down a fleeting spark of eternity in the present. He chooses five books on time as a philosophical concept and our tenuous understanding of the same.

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  • Phillip Vannini on The Ethnography of Music

    The Professor of Communication and Culture says music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques which we use to work out harder at the gym or set the tone for a date. ‘I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?’ he asks. He chooses five books on what music means.

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  • Darius Rejali on Violence

    The author of Torture and Democracy gives a harrowing interview on the effects of violence, torture and trauma on the human being. He says many army torturers can’t confess for fear of losing their pensions, and if they don’t confess they can’t get help. Torture, he says, is a slippery slope.

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  • Jonathan Haidt on Happiness

    The author of The Happiness Hypothesis says there is an eternal battle between the Apollonian spirit of order and the Dionysian spirit of revelry and collective ecstasy. Even though Apollo has the upper hand in the West, you can’t stamp Dionysus out completely.

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  • Adam Haslett on Evil

    The bestselling author defines the existential origin of evil as the refusal to acknowledge and confront our own mortality. The murderer, he says, is the person who tries to avoid the inevitability of his own death by taking the power of life into his hands. He chooses five books that give a secular definition of evil, always intertwined with love.

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The Confessions is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension Carlos Eire
The Confessions
St Augustine
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Even though he is no philosopher Vonnegut is still able to ask the questions that all of us think about – how time affects our lives Carlos Eire
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
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The title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, comes from the main character’s obsession with the fact that all we have is the now, nothing else except the ever-moving now Carlos Eire
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
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Nieremberg is taking St Augustine to the extreme and saying that, rather than time being meaningful, it is non-existent compared to the eternal Carlos Eire
A Treatise on the Difference between Temporal and Eternal
Juan Eusebio Nieremberg
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Meister Eckhart was a Dominican priest in the 14th century. His sermons are very philosophical and focus on this idea of the now versus forever Carlos Eire
From Whom God Hid Nothing
Meister Eckhart
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This is a book about the genesis of a single memorandum authorising what I would call torture Darius Rejali
Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values
Philippe Sands
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This book takes the story of a tank unit in Iraq that ended up being assigned to prison detail Darius Rejali
None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture
Joshua E S Phillips
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This is a story of a female academic who is brutally attacked and left for dead in a ditch. Her assailant is captured and tried and she is a witness at the trial Darius Rejali
Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self
Susan J Brison
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This one is a book about human rights workers and the world that they inhabit and it captures all the inner tensions that human rights work involves Darius Rejali
That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity
James Dawes
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For people who are not familiar with the range of the poetry of witness, this is incredibly powerful reading. The book shows that even in the darkest moments, imagination remains alive Darius Rejali
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Carolyn Forché
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This book on the human capacity and even need for group cohesion helps explain things like the rave phenomenon, and why we like to move in synchrony so much Jonathan Haidt
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Barbara Ehrenreich
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If your goal is to actually raise your happiness level, then this is the best book to read – it has very concrete suggestions of what you can do Jonathan Haidt
The How of Happiness
Sonja Lyubomirsky
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The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster
Jonathan Haidt
Jessica Pryce-Jones
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert
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Brim recognises that our basic psychology is one of striving. When we get what we hoped for, we don’t celebrate for more than a minute – or a day at most Jonathan Haidt
Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives
Gilbert Brim
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The Dhammapada is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied Jonathan Haidt
Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha
A rendering by Thomas Byrom
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I think the classic image of evil in the book is Ahab as this man bent on revenge against the great whale that has taken his leg from him and the incredible distorting power of revenge Adam Haslett
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
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The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that, in this profound book, Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it Adam Haslett
Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the problem of Evil
Paul W Kahn
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What I find so compelling about it is it offers a reading of that play which strikes at the core of everyday experience Adam Haslett
Disowning Knowledge
Stanley Cavell
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It is a very well-written and detailed account of how countries have been affected and infected by the oil industry and how the politics have been distorted Adam Haslett
Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
Peter Maass
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Subculturalists are a lot more playful than originally thought, and lot more diverse – within their own scene – than previously argued Philip Vannini
Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style
David Muggleton
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The beauty of Music Scenes comes from its own internal diversity. There are essays on the ‘tween scene’, on London’s salsa scene, on riot grrrl, on karaoke, etc Philip Vannini
Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual
Andy Bennett and Richard A Peterson
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Thornton finds that insiders to these scenes share a meaningful taste culture – regardless of what others think of it Philip Vannini
Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital
Sarah Thornton
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Bull’s argument and findings point to the ways in which people create personalised urban soundscapes through their portable music players Philip Vannini
Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience
Michael Bull
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DeNora finds that music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques, which we utilise, for example, to work out harder at the gym or clean up floors to Philip Vannini
Music in Everyday Life
Tia DeNora
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Key Points of This Week`s Debate

Carlos Eir:  St Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. The Confessions, written between AD397 and AD398, is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be. Continue Reading...

Phillip Vannini: Think of financial capital, for example: it’s something you accumulate over time by collecting pieces of it, money in this case. Once you have enough you can make certain claims: you claim to be a millionaire, to be successful, to be a VIP, and maybe even demand that you be allowed into that exclusive country club. Subcultural capital works in similar ways. Over time you become an insider by acting like an insider, by displaying conspicuously elements of that scene.  Continue Reading...

Darius Rejali: The Rumsfeld Memo authorising the use of torture was issued to the American military at Guantanamo in December of 2002; the draft was begun in October 2002, and Rumsfeld rescinded it in January of 2003. Continue Reading...

Jonathan Haidt: Gilbert Brim has this phrase that I’ve never forgotten: he advises us to live life ‘at the level of just manageable difficulty’. So, if you live life at 50 per cent of your capacity, you’ll be bored and disengaged; if you live it at 100 per cent of your capacity, you’re going to be burned out, but if you live at about 85 per cent on average, with some fluctuations, that’s about the best you can do.  Continue Reading...

Adam Haslett: What sets Moby-Dick apart and makes it a great work of literature is that, like Milton in Paradise Lost, Melville paints his villain with such a richness of language that the portrait becomes a kind of celebration of the figure despite his actions. The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light, Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance. It has its own dark dignity. Again, as Kahn points out, evil and love are deeply interwined. Continue Reading...

Last Week's Topic: Israel and Palestine

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The Death of Wat Tyler

This image depicts the end of the 1381 peasant's revolt, the image shows London's mayor, Walworth, killing Wat Tyler. There are two images of Richard II. One looks on the killing while the other is talking to the peasants.

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