I’ve a piece on Dante just published at Aeon. Dante Alighieri was early in recognising that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the…
I’ve a piece on Dante just published at Aeon. Dante Alighieri was early in recognising that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the…
Categories like feminine and masculine can constrain as much as illuminate. But there is no denying that men and male entities play a major, often surprising part in Dante’s journey through the Divine Comedy. This talk complements my look at…
Categories like feminine and masculine can constrain as much as illuminate. But there is no denying that women and female entities play a major, often surprising part in Dante’s journey through the Divine Comedy. Saints including Beatrice, Lucia and Mary,…
I’ve notice a tendency to downplay the divine element in accounts of William Blake, and to reduce his understanding of the imagination to a human artefact, from its true status as a supernatural capacity that he knew. In this talk…
Covid has brought the reality of death into the centre of our lives, but what can we learn about death in response? This episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, with Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon, is prompted by a sense that…
Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713) may be the greatest English philosopher you have never heard of. In the 18th century, he was said to be the most famous philosopher in Europe. His ideas suffered in England, as those of his empiricist…
The Divine Comedy aims to deepen and broaden our perception of reality, often by exploding preconceptions. Nowhere is this more true than in Dante’s take on the Christian perception of the Trinity. For Dante, it is way more than a…
A short discussion of psychodynamic psychotherapy, talking about the experience of suffering, the ego, the past and present, and the future change as people move through three zones – which might be described as hell, purgatory and paradise.