Category Archives: Kenan Malik

CALLING LONDON, EDINBURGH AND AMERICA

June 14, 2014 by Kenan Malik

News on talks that are coming up, possibly coming up and moving. . London My London Philosophy Club talk next week has been moved back from Thursday 19th (when England are playing Uruguay in the World Cup) to Tuesday 17th. I would have sacrificed football for philosophy but the organisers decided that it was not worth risking an empty room. However exciting it might be to listen to me talk of Confucius or Kant or Original Sin, it might be a […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: talks

IGNORANCE, DISHONESTY AND JOHN GRAY

June 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

John Gray, former Professor of European Thought at the LSE, last week reviewed The Quest for a Moral Compass for the New Statesman, for which he is the lead reviewer. (The review is not online but I will try to include it in my next round-up of commentary on my book.) It was what you might call a ‘scorched earth’ review. The Quest for a Moral Compass is, Gray claimed, a ‘rationalist fairytale’ from which ‘all of the repugnant and troubling […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History of moral thought • Tags: john gray, kenan malik's books

FIRST WORD ON THE QUEST

May 26, 2014 by Kenan Malik

These are the early reviews of The Quest for a Moral Compass – and very heartening they are too. You can read the opening section of the book, and a talk I gave about it at the Glasgow Aye Write Festival. And you can buy the book from the Pandaemonium bookshop. I will publish later reviews in time. . Anthony Kenny, Literary Review , May 2014 Kenan Malik invites his readers to consider the following questions. Can the mind be understood scientifically, […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History of moral thought, Kenan Malik • Tags: history of moral thought, kenan malik's books

WITHOUT A MORAL SAFETY NET

May 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of a talk about my book The Quest for a Moral Compass that I gave at the Glasgow Aye Write festival last month. You can buy the book from my Pandaemonium bookshop. For other talks that I am giving see the Events page. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? Those are the questions at the heart of my book. And those are the questions […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, christianity, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, holocaust, human agency, human nature, modernity, religion, sam harris, viktor frankl

OUT NOW!

May 1, 2014 by Kenan Malik

. My book The Quest for a Moral Compass is published today! Here is the opening section to the book, and an extract that discusses the meaning of morality in the modern world. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass from most bookshops, from Amazon or via my Pandaemonium bookstore. The US version of the book comes out in September. . ‘An absolute tour de force. I can imagine it replacing Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy on many a bookshelf […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: history of moral thought, kenan malik's books

THE UNRAVELLING OF MORALITY

April 29, 2014 by Kenan Malik

My book The Quest for a Moral Compass is published this week. There has already been an early review in the Tablet from the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who compared the book to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy: This is intellectual history in the grand manner, in the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, written with the same clarity, accessibility and narrative verve as the master himself. As the subtitle, “a global history of ethics”, makes clear, […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aquinas, aristotle, emotivism, enlightenment, ethics, history of moral thought, human agency, human nature, liberalism, marxism, modernity, moral autonomy, teleology, virtue ethics

ON THE ROAD

April 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I am giving a number of talks over the next couple of months, both about my new book The Quest for a Moral Compass and on other issues from freedom of expression to the Enlightenment. Do come along if you are able. . 3 May Belfast Free as a Bird? Belfast Exposed The Exchange Place 23 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2FF 15.30-17.00 A discussion about artistic freedom of expression with Johnanna Schwartz, John Johnson, Sinead O’Donnell and myself. There will also […]

Categories: Kenan Malik • Tags: broadcasts, talks

ALMOST HERE…

April 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Yes, it’s almost here! My new book, The Quest for a Moral Compass will be published by Atlantic on 1 May. Here, as an introduction, is the opening section of the book. The Quest for a Moral Compass ‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and the birds’ feasting; and […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ethics, fate, free will, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, homer, human agency, kenan malik's books

TOP QUARK

March 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

My essay, In Defence of Diversity, has won the 3 Quarks Daily 2014 Politics and Social Science Prize. My thanks to 3 Quarks Daily (which, if you don’t know already, is a superb web-based magazine/portal) and to Mark Blyth who judged the competition. The other winning essays were Filipe Gracio’s Democratic Austerity: Semi-sovereign states, semi-sovereign peoples and Philip Cohen’s State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely. And here is the full list of the other […]

Categories: Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium

VOTE, VOTE, VOTE

March 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

OK, not the most important vote of the year, but 3 Quarks Daily has opened the voting for its 2014 Politics and Social Science blogging award. For those who don’t know this is an annual prize for the best blog post or online writing on politics and social science. There are this year 32 nominees, one of which is my ‘In Defence of Diversity’. 3QD readers get to vote on the nominated posts, to reduce the list to 20; the editors […]

Categories: Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium • Tags: competitions

THE 3 QUARKS DAILY PRIZE

February 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

3 Quarks Daily, the superb web-based magazine/portal, has relaunched its annual prize for the best blog and online writing on politics and social science. The judge this year will be Mark Blyth, professor of international political economy at Brown University. Back in 2011 my essay on ‘Rethinking the Idea of Christian Europe’ won the 3QD prize for that year. In keeping with the 3QD tradition of self-nomination I have nominated for this year’s competition my essay ‘In Defence of Diversity’. […]

Categories: Kenan Malik, Pandaemonium • Tags: competitions

ANGELS AND DEVILS, MYTHS AND MONSTERS

February 1, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I was recently interviewed by Faculti, a superb website that publishes videos of authors and academics talking about their work. I discussed my book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy. Here are the two recordings from the Faculti interview. The first is a reading from the final section of From Fatwa to Jihad in which I argue that The Satanic Verses is not as most people imagine it to be; Salman Rushdie’s novel is not a critique […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Kenan Malik • Tags: From Fatwa to Jihad, kenan malik's books, rushdie affair, salma, the satanic verses

WHAT DID THE GREEKS EVER DO FOR GOD?

December 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have been publishing on Pandaemonium a series of ‘lost pages’ from The Quest for a Moral Compass, my forthcoming book on the history of moral thought, due to be published in April. In completing the book, I had to cut the original manuscript quite considerably. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. Previous such ‘lost pages’ included abandoned sections on Machiavelli, Descartes, John Locke, Greek cynics, atomists, skeptics and […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aristotle, christianity, evil, god, greek philosophy, morality, plato, religion, socrates, st paul, unmoved mover

GOD AND EVIL

October 13, 2013 by Kenan Malik

No, not a screed on the evils of religion, but an exploration of how monotheistic faiths (and Christianity in particular) account for evil in the world. It is another in the ‘Lost Pages’ series – sections of The Quest for a Moral Compass, my book on the global history of ethics, that I had to cut from the final version for reasons of space. Previous excerpts were on Machiavelli, Descartes, Locke and Greek cynics, skeptics, atomists and relativists. Since this extract is long, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: augustine, bible, book of job, christianity, evil, free will, god, original sin, religion, satan

JOHN LOCKE AND THE NOT-QUITE-GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

August 25, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have been publishing on Pandaemonium a series of ‘lost pages’ from The Quest for a Moral Compass, my forthcoming book on the history of moral thought. In completing the book, I had to cut the original manuscript quite considerably. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. Previous excerpts were on Machiavelli, Descartes and Greek cynics, atomists, skeptics and relativists. This extract is about John Locke and the […]

Categories: History, History of moral thought • Tags: catholicism, english history, free speech, glorious revolution, locke, religious freedom, spinoza