What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existe….

For many years, questions about the meaning of life were dismissed as senseless. We were told that life, not being a word or sentence or anything lan….

I think it's true that for existentialist thinkers, appreciation of what we are - free, makers of meaning, 'issues' for ourselves, and so on - is at ….

How people make gardens is bound to reflect a way of experiencing the natural world, while at the same time this experience of nature is bound to ref….

To describe this world is not to describe reality 'in itself', as it is independently of how we regard and describe it..

The aim of dis-incumbence is a hubristic one, for it requires confidence in the ability of men and women to live in the belief that nothing they do c….

To recognize that you are radically free, in Sartre's sense, but then to live as if you weren't, is to live in bad faith, in denial of what you know ….

I was keen to dispel a familiar misunderstanding: that existentialists somehow relish the alienation of human beings from the world. This may have be….

There are really three players: 'absolutists', for whom it is possible to describe reality as it anyway is; 'constructivists' or 'humanists', for who….

Certainly each side - the 'absolutists' and the 'constructivists' or 'humanists', as I've labelled them - accuses the other of hubris, and lays claim….

The question of meaning goes all the way down: if human life as a whole is meaningless, so is everything that occurs or belongs within it. Since that….

One thing that attracts me in Daoism and Heidegger is a delicate combination of recognizing deep differences between human being and any other kind o….

It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educationa….

My 'heroes' are those - like Chuang Tzu and Heidegger - who recognize that the world of experience is a human world, but recognize too that there is ….

The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of scientific description, but ….

For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also….

In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, ou….

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words….

As for the meaning of gardens, particular gardens may have, of course, all sorts of different meanings - emotive, historical, emblematic, religious, ….

There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combine….

The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is no world beyond the human world. They w….