Why is French film important? Not only because the French, such as Auguste and Louis Lumiére -- who invented the cinématographe -- and Alice Guy Blaché were among the pioneers of film technology, but because as film directors and...
In his magisterial work, Modern European Thought, Franklin Baumer alludes to the "three blows" that humanity (one could also say "the human ego") has suffered since the end of the European Middle Ages. First, Copernicus delivered the blow that dethro...
Nietzsche once remarked that life would be "aimless" (a confused "getting lost") without music. There are many instances of musical performance that attest to the accuracy of this insight, and among these one must certainly count the music of Leonard...
The recent South African matric results are no cause for celebration -- that much is clear. The question is: what should be done to improve them, assuming that this can be done without dropping intellectual standards so drastically that the descripti...
In my last post, I placed Cameron's Avatar in the interpretive framework of eco-political thought and practice. One could approach it in different ways, too, of course, one of which is to look at its interesting configuration of the relation between ...
James Cameron's latest film, Avatar, is, as far as I can judge, a highly significant film, at least as important as the first two Terminator films (and in a related sense, Titanic) directed by him. It has been criticised in various quarters as just a...
In my previous post I said that one has to go further (as Kierkegaard himself went further) than the two Kierkegaardian models discussed earlier. More specifically, in the last section of Either/or, II -- entitled "Ultimatum", which consists largely ...
In my previous post, I reconstructed Kierkegaard's aesthetic model for existence briefly, pointing out the implications this way of living has for human relationships and for one's sense of identity. This is not unproblematic, of course. Hence the re...
In Either/Or, Volumes I and II, Kierkegaard constructs different models of human existence. They seem to be primarily intended by him as mirrors in which his readers may recognise themselves, or as fictions which could function as indications of diff...
So much for dubbing Copenhagen Hopenhagen at the recent UN world climate change conference -- judging by the lukewarm "accord" that was finally "accepted", the hope was disappointed. Just how serious this failure to arrive at a strong, international,...
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.
