When the animal becomes human, the effect is pleasingly benign and we laugh outloud, "Okay come clean now. This isn't really about hunting, is it?" B….

Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and….

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth..

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility..

Philosophy is the art of dying.Philosophy is an activity that has always been concerned with how one seizes hold of one's mortality, and I see myself….

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind….

I guess what happens to a lot of people as they get older is that they get more conservative, but with me, the opposite is the case..

I have argued that philosophy doesn't begin in wonder or in the fact that things are, it begins in a realization that things are not what they might ….

Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he l….

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were re….

Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting th….

I think that when people are at their best, when they are thinking, reflecting, cogitating, then they are doing philosophy. So I don't see philosophy….

Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that….

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality..

If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then t….

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the aff….

Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's w….

I've always been very keen on Pascal, and what I'm most keen on in Pascal is his emphasis upon human wretchedness. He has a phrase which goes somethi….

Humour is human. Why? Well, because the Philosopher, Aristotle, says so..

It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing..

The philosopher is someone who doesn't know, but who wants to find out..