Full Circle

Just to show that these not so random thoughts on life really aren't completely random, but that there really is a pattern to all this, it's worth pointing out that our friend Professor Robert Solomon probably wouldn't have taken up Philosophy if it hadn't had been for Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of 'eternal recurrence'.

When Solomon was a medical student at the University of Michigan, he seemingly stumbled across a crowded lecture hall in which a professor was delivering a Philosophy lecture in which he was discussing Nietzsche's idea of 'eternal recurrence'. Solomon was apparently so moved by the lecture and this idea in particular, that later that day he approached the Dean of the Medical School to transfer from Medicine to Philosophy.

Are we awake?

My drive to and from work is this week more illuminating than usual. As I navigate the traffic on the M6 and M62 I've been listening to a series of lectures on Existentialism (as you do). I'm now on lecture 4 of a series of 20 lectures by Professor Robert Solomon that are entitled "No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life". Solomon was, until his sudden death of a heart attack last year, professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and was by all accounts a very highly regarded scholar and speaker on this topic. And I can see (or rather hear) why. His delivery is rather downbeat and fairly matter-of-fact, but he makes the subject matter very accessible and relates the ideas he discusses to everyday life.

To give you an idea of his style, below is a short clip from YouTube that's taken from Richard Linklater's film Waking Life. It's actually a kind of animated version of Solomon as the film uses something called digital rotoscoping to create its unusual effect. I'd really like to see all of this film but it seems to be only available in NTSC format (still, there's plenty of excerpts from the film on YouTube). Anyway, the clip gives you an idea of Solomon's approach.