Recent events in South Africa (like the looming attempts to control the media), together with a comment by "Maria" on one of my previous posts, have set me wondering if we are seeing the beginnings of what Arundhati Roy, Indian social activist and no...
Listening to SAfm this morning, I heard part of a phone-in discussion between the presenter and a representative of a company that has done research on the number of public schools as opposed to private schools in South Africa. The discussion focused...
The world ain't what it used to be. Globalisation arguably started as long ago as Macedonian Alexander the Great's military expansion towards the East, followed by the Roman Empire's far-flung hold on the ancient world (and if one really wanted to pu...
Journalism is usually, and I believe accurately, associated with the uncovering and reporting of "facts". Investigative journalism, especially, involves the (sometimes difficult, even dangerous) ferreting out of "facts" that are not generally known, ...
Architecture is usually understood as the science, or art, of designing buildings with a view to constructing them, but among its current definitions one also finds concepts such as "network architecture", and the structural interaction, behaviour or...
Some time ago, I wrote a post called "The changing face of identity", where I pondered the relevance of Sherry Turkle’s work on the status of identity in the age of the internet for virtual social spaces like Facebook. At the time I surmised that s...
What do soccer and philosophy have in common? Or, to put it another way -- what interest do they share? It is probably safe to say that these interests are, first and foremost, moral and aesthetic. Was it Camus who said that everything he had learned...
Few people seem to recognize that democracy has an economic side to it -- one powerfully intimated at the close of Michael Moore's latest documentary film, Capitalism -- A Love Affair, where he observes (I don't recall his exact words) that in the li...
Africa is part of the developing world. When given the opportunity – likely to be opened up to a greater extent than before by the Fifa World Cup being staged in South Africa -- to allow foreign investment here, as well as in the rest of Africa, wo...
In Leonard Shlain's wonderful book, Sex, Time and Power (2003), he makes the following observation: "Our ancestors would ... bring about the greatest mass extinction of large animals since the dinosaurs abruptly disappeared 65-million years ago. Thro...
Bert Olivier is Professor of Philosophy at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He holds an MA and DPhil in philosophy, has held postdoctoral fellowships in philosophy at Yale University in the US on more than one occasion, and has held a research fellowship at the University of Wales, Cardiff.
At NMMU he teaches various sub-disciplines of philosophy, as well as film studies, media and architectural theory, and psychoanalytic theory. He has published widely in the philosophy of culture, art and architecture, cinema, music and literature, as well as the philosophy of science, epistemology, psychoanalytic, social, media and discourse theory. In 2004 he was awarded the Stals Prize for Philosophy by the South African Academy for Arts and Sciences, in 2005 he received the award of Top Researcher at NMMU for the period 1999 to 2004, in 2006 the award for Top Researcher in the Faculty of Arts at NMMU, and in 2008 and 2009 he was both Faculty of Arts Researcher of the Year, and NMMU Researcher of the Year.
