death of god | Pandaemonium

TALKING MORALITY

November 24, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I was a guest last week on Neil Denny’s Little Atoms show on Resonance FM, talking about the history of morality. Also on the show was Rebecca Goldstein, author of the wonderful Plato at the Googleplex, discussing Plato and his relevance. Unfortunately the two interviews were recorded separately, so we were not able to discuss issues on air. Nevertheless it was an honour to find myself on the same show. I have also uploaded here videos of a couple of […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: death of god, history of moral thought, morality, talks

THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE FALL OF MAN

July 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week to the Academy, a conference organised by the Institute of Ideas. ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. And yet, misattributed it may be, it is nevertheless a sentiment that runs through much of Dostoevsky’s work, including his greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov. And it does so because […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aristotle, christianity, death of god, elizabeth anscombe, emotivism, enlightenment, greek philosophy, harriet martineau, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris, sartre, telos

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 13]: NIETZSCHE, NIHILISM AND THE DEATH OF GOD

February 12, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 14, which is devoted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This extract is from the discussion of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche trained as a philologist, not as a philosopher, and his writing is quite unlike traditional philosophical work, whether the dry, rigorous plodding of an Aristotle or a Kant, or the flights of sometimes barely-intelligible fancy that mark the work […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: christianity, death of god, ethics, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, judaism, kenan malik's books, nietzsche, reason, religion

THE SEARCH FOR ETHICAL CONCRETE [PART 2]

March 31, 2011 by Kenan Malik

This is the second part of my talk on ‘God, science and the quest for moral certainty’. I posted the first part yesterday. The whole of the transcript is on my archive site. IF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SAW THE ‘DEATH OF GOD’ – MUCH EXAGGERATED though that death may have been – the twentieth century witnessed what we might call the Fall of Man. The history of the twentieth century – two world wars, the Depression and Holocaust, Auschwitz and […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, berlin wall, camus, death of god, eo wilson, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, french revolution, god, human agency, human nature, julian savulescu, michael ignatieff, murray bookchin, plato, sam harris

THE SEARCH FOR ETHICAL CONCRETE

March 29, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk last week at a conference on ‘The Lust for Certainty’, organized by the Sea of Faith network. I enjoyed the event, especially Julian Baggini’s challenge to the very idea that the principal problem we face today is a lust for certainty. As troublesome as dogmatism, he suggested, if not not more so, is relativism and the refusal to be judgmental. In other words, the problem of lust not for certainty but for uncertainty (an argument with which […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: aquinas, darwin, death of god, enlightenment, ethics, god, julian baggini, julian savulescu, marc hauser, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris