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….

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

Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable kind are generated..

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 ….

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

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 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….

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….

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….

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

There is no reason at all to think that creatures with very different purposes and concerns would arrive at the scientific image, and no reason at al….

Chuang Tzu and Heidegger both emphasise the virtue of 'spontaneity' - a sort of mindful responsiveness to things as they are. It's this notion, I sus….

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….

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 ….

Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing tr….

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….

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

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

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

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….

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