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This image represents a character who only plays in some of our casts: The Philosopher.
This character is the most unsung hero of the entire cast collection. Not only is the Philosopher rarely utilized but his very existence is barely known, buried 6ft under stigma. To paraphrase Seneca; the Philosopher builds the personality, orders one's life, regulates one's conduct and sits at the helm, keeping one on the correct course despite being tossed about in perilous seas.
Through their flow of constant rationality, they're able to analyze our behavioural thought patterns and in short, reveal what we ought to do and what we ought to not.
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In reflection of humankind, I no longer see any soul or overall governing self in individuals. There is no Jay Cloud, there is only a network of characters and desires competing for attention and control.
The Academy of Athens with statues of Athena (upper left), Apollo (upper right), Socrates (lower right) and Plato (lower left)
Grave of Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (UK: /ˈpwæ̃kɑːreɪ/[4] [US: stress final syllable], French: [ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe](About this soundlisten);[5][6] 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist",[7]since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
[The image above presents David Edmonds’ book about Derek Parfit who we see on the far right carrying all his camera gear in the snow at Leningrad in the 1970s. In the centre we have the covers of Parfit’s books all with photographs taken by Derek in Venice and Leningrad (Saint Petersburg). Underneath is a small selection of his meticulously crafted photos.]
David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality (Princeton University Press, 2023).
When the Oxford philosopher, Derek Parfit, died at 74 in 2017, he was widely regarded as the greatest moral philosopher of his times. His brilliant career was marked by a passionate search to find an objective normative foundation for ethics. This is not surprising given his upbringing. Born of missionary parents in China in 1942, the highly intelligent Derek lost his faith in his teens over the question of God and suffering. However, despite a lifelong commitment to atheism, he was never able to shake the belief that unless morals could be grounded in something objectively true, then life itself was meaningless.
We won’t pursue that argument here, but it is certainly ground that I have trod for much of my life, for many of the same reasons as Parfit, though I think it is plainly obvious that many people are able to find a life of meaning and substance without belief in God or believing there is some sort of moral law in the universe. In fact, it can be argued that choosing to live an ethical life by doing no harm to others, is more subjectively true than obeying some supposed divine or cosmic set of laws – especially when the religious worldview has a tendency to shut down debate about what exactly is ethical or not.
Parfit was a perfectionist, and reading this brilliant biography by David Edmonds, leaves us with a strong feeling that Voltaire’s dictum is right, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Parfit spent years obsessing over the perfect text, and it is perhaps a miracle we have his great book Reasons and Persons (1984) at all. For the average mortal, this is the most painful fact about Parfit’s life. He worked and reworked his texts literally hundreds of times driving publishers up the wall. It will come as no surprise that Parfit applied the same principles to his photography.
Veteran journalist, Bryan Appleyard (an astute photographer himself), wrote a fine piece about an exhibition of Parfit’s photographs soon after his death, entitled, “Derek Parfit’s Quest for Perfection”. www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2018/06/derek-parfit-mind...
[By the way Bryan Appleyard posts on Flickr and his work is always interesting. www.flickr.com/photos/bryanappleyard/ ]
To call Parfit a hobbyist would be to stretch the definition of that word. He was an obsessive photographer. His wife Janet Radcliffe Richards, who is herself a brilliant philosopher, described Derek as, “My lovely duomaniac.” Photography, like philosophy, was just another way Parfit sought perfection. But the practicalities of real experience brought with it a confronting challenge where almost every photograph is a defeat to some degree or another (don’t we know the truth of that).
Shooting with Nikon F cameras with tilt-shift lenses on colour slide film, and also a Linhof 5x4 large format camera, Parfit took tens of thousands of photographs and yet he only kept 120 that he considered “worthy”. Some of these were displayed in the exhibition that Appleyard describes.
Parfit’s method after spending days at a time meticulously photographing his subjects under different light conditions (mainly classical buildings), was to sort through his catch and only keep those he considered his very best work. These were then sent to a professional printmaker who was to employ the dark arts of darkroom skills (at great expense). Often a print would be sent back with new instructions 6 or 7 times before Parfit was prepared to accept it as close to his ideal aesthetic standards. Parfit did not believe he was in any way a great artist, but he believed he was a good critic, and this winnowing process sorted out the rare wheat from the majority of chaff. When the digital era broke, Parfit was an early adopter, and this allowed him to Photoshop his own work. But once again his accepted output was extremely limited, though he continued to take thousands of photographs. The one thing Parfit would never have done is post his work on any form of social media. He was a perfectionist and he was obsessive. And now the philosopher asks the question: Why?
The first thing Parfit acknowledged was that he suffered from a condition known as “aphantasia “, the inability to form mental images. So in one sense photography was his means of apprehending the visual world. He recorded what he saw on film because he couldn’t recall it with any clarity otherwise. But usually what he sought to record on film was a sense of the timelessness of things. In this sense photography is a medium par excellence. In the very same way Parfit tried to find timeless moral principles in the universe, he attempted to create photographs with the same qualities. His working and reworking of his favourite photographs was to fix in final form something essential about the image. Hence the obsession.
Photography and philosophy are not the usual bedfellows. There are a number of thinkers who try to find a link between the two disciplines - notably Tim Carpenter in his moving and complex arguments in To Photograph is to Learn How to Die (2022), but then Tim is a photographer. Most philosophers treat photography as merely a past-time, though the French postmodern theorist Roland Barthes had much to say about it in Camera Lucida (1980), despite not taking photographs in any serious way himself. For Barthes photography was a means of revealing the past, for Carpenter it is a way to stop the flow of time, “a momentary stay against the ceaseless ache of existence.” For Derek Parfit, however, the true essence of photography was in finding the timeless.
Perhaps this is why, as beautiful as his photographs truly are with all that wonderful Venetian mist and Saint Petersburg snow, they come over as completely static like those ancient insects trapped in amber. I would argue the same could be said for Parfit’s normative moral philosophy. There’s no elbow room in there. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and that applies equally to photography as it does to ethics.
Derek Parfit’s Photography
press.princeton.edu/resources/parfit?srsltid=AfmBOopCpAMd...
The Mind’s Eye: The Photographs of Derek Parfit
narrativeprojects.com/exhibitions/the-minds-eye/
Derek Parfit’s photographs of Venice
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Srg8fsYvqSk3PQgzy/derek...
The Philosopher in the Dark Room
narrativeprojects.com/wp-content/uploads/DerbyshireFTWM28...
David Edmonds on Parfit
press.princeton.edu/ideas/david-edmonds-on-parfit-a-philo...
Imperfect Parfit
philosophersmag.com/imperfect-parfit/
Derek Parfit by Jonathan Dancy
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/890/19-Memoirs-03-P...
VIDEO: Derek Parfit – Full Address at the Oxford Union
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTUrwO9-B_I
* Cover photo taken with the Leica D-Lux 7.
A collection of famous Greek philosophers: From top left, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Geoffrey of West Samothrace and Diogenes.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Titanic September 2017
Überraschung
Arbeitslos
Drogenkrank
Nymphoman
Wahlsieg in Gefahr :
Meng-tse war ein chinesischer Philosoph,Er erkannte zuerst das Volk als die Grundlage des Staates.Und Er sprach einmal kluge Worte über den Zorn.Werde nie Zornig.Sonst,könntest Du an einem Tag das Holz verbrennen,das Du in vielen sauren Wochen gesammelt hast !
1. Bazsi cat as a philosopher-Bazsi filozófikus hangulatban, 2. Table's composition.Őszi asztali kompozicióm, 3. Car and the autumn-Őszi autó, 4. Cat in the bag-Cica a szatyorban, 5. Wooden cigar's flower -Bakaszirvarfa virága, 6. A colorful Life-Egy színes Életecske, 7. One my fav road-Kedvenc utcácskám Mátyásföldön, 8. Moment on my winter-road-Régi ház a kerítésen át,
9. I am on my Chirstmas tree-Lógok a fenyőfámon, 10. My winter road without snow-Hó nélküli téli utam, 11. The last minutes of autumn in Budapest-Az utolsó őszi pillanatok, 12. Haha!Donka interested in the camera-Mi ez itt az orrom előtt?, 13. Last blue kiss from the Nature-Az utolsó kék-ölelés a természettől, 14. Traditional carved gate- Székely kapu Mátyásföldön, 15. Our Balaton lake with a tree-A mi Balaton partunk, 16. Just I am flying to you with this airplane-Repülök hozzád (:,
17. Soft colours of our Spring -Balaton-lake-A mi tavaszi Balatonunk lágy színei május 1-jén, 18. flickr.com/photos/29411055@N07/5462710278/, 19. Morocco-My appartman, 20. I liked this colorful flowers, 21. What a simple and nice flowers!, 22. Mimoza-flower, 23. flickr.com/photos/29411055@N07/3429477596/, 24. 1 yellow rose from my Birthday's flowers,
25. DEGUS-FRIENDSHIP
Created with fd's Flickr Toys
Rambling up the southern side of the Heiligenberg, across the Neckar from the castle, one will find the Philosopher's Walk. Its name, it is said, stems from the fact that university professors and philosophers walked there, perhaps using the solitude of the forest and the incredible views of the city and surrounding area for inspiration. If you visit Heidelberg during the summer months, you will notice an interesting feature about the Philosopher's Walk – it has a climate which is much more temperate, almost Mediterranean-like, than that of the valley. In fact, you will see many plants growing here that normally cannot thrive in the northern, more milder weather, such as lemon trees, pomegranates, cypresses, and palm trees...
...taken at the CCIB, Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona, during the EACTS Annual Meeting...
Barcelona, Spain...
"The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.”
-William Makepeace Thackeray, from The Social Pipe
Explored [Sep 6, 2016]
We happened to meet the three of us: the intruder, the bird and this amazing spotlight. I say I was the luckiest...
View of Dugald Stewart Monument, Edinburgh (Scotland, October 2016)
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Le cercle des Philosophes disparus, Vue du Dugald Stewart Monument à Edimbourg (Ecosse, Octobre 2016)
At the turn of the 20th century Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published his seminal book, "The Interpretation of Dreams". It was a book that signaled the beginning of a new century where the old assurance of Enlightenment rationalism would be swept away. In its place would emerge not so much a "dream" (Traum in German), but a trauma.
I don't apologise for addressing these issues on Flickr, because as you should have realised by now I see myself as a philosopher who uses photography to achieve his ends. Whilst it has become fashionable to simply dismiss Freud as a kind of "fraud" - a misogynistic thinker who obsessed over the role that sex plays in human lives and civilisation - this is a clearly a huge mistake. There is so much to be learned from Freud, even though I believe he is mistaken on so many levels. A great starting point is his little hand grenade of a book, "Civilization and its Discontents" (published in Vienna in 1930, right on the eve of Hitler's accession to power in Germany).
Now all that is preamble to the work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Jung was undoubtedly Freud's protégé. When they first met, they talked non-stop for 13 hours on psychoanalytic theory. Freud saw him as the obvious person to take his Psychoanalytic method even further. More than that, he saw himself as Jung's intellectual "father figure". But Jung was to prove a not so dutiful "son". The break came suddenly on a lecture tour of the USA which they shared in 1908.
Jung was starting to think that Freud's view of the Unconscious was very limited and constrained by his rationalism. Their work on the importance of dreams and dream interpretation was beginning to reflect this. For the romantic Freud, dreams were the way the subconscious dealt with random bits of information from the "day-life", and the work of dreams was trying to put them into some sort of meaningful patterns. But Jung was beginning to discover that "dream-work" was not so much to make sense of the "day-life" as it was an induction into a complete Otherworld. For Jung the Unconscious was real, and the Collective Unconscious was the reservoir from which each individual human psyche emerged. This became known as the "Individuation Process".
Jung was to write his own work on the interpretation of dreams, but the most important thing that happened to him after his break from Freud (remember he was actually excommunicated from the Psychoanalytic Society that Freud had set up), was that he had a breakdown.
This video essentially tells the story of the key things that Jung discovered in this period from 1913 to 1919. He recorded them in a personal manuscript that is known as "The Red Book". It is a masterpiece of artistic and intellectual work that did not see the light of day until 2009. The book itself was completed in 1930, although there is a lovely final inscription from 1959 (that you'll see here).
Please pause the video at points where you can take a closer look at Jung's art and inscriptions.
It is significant that Jung's breakdown occurred at the very time when Europe was about to be bathed in the blood of the First World War. It began with what seemed to Jung to be crazed visions, but as he allowed his Unconscious to speak to him, he found a path through the thicket into a clearing of healing. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had much to say about clearings as well, but that's a matter for another time. Jung became the archetype of "The Wounded Healer". A compassionate one.
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html
* If you want to see how a modern psychologist has taken Jung's work on dreams even further, let me recommend the great work of the late James Hillman (1826-2011), "The Dream and the Underworld" (1975).
"Vielleicht bin ich schon morgen eine Leiche!" - 'Maybe I'll be a corpse tomorrow!'
Beer and war turn a Landsturm soldier into a philosopher.
Published by J. Schreiber, München, ca. 1915.
North wing of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; behind this door is the Philosopher's Gallery event space. This is the original 1914 building designed by the firm Darling and Pearson. Intruding on it is the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2007.
There is a small island off the coast of Kanyakumari, reachable by a 10-minute ride by ferry. The island houses a few different Hindu temples, but principally a monument to Swami Vivekananda, the 19th century Indian Hindu monk and spiritual leader.
Near this island is also a large rock that serves as a monument to Thiruvalluvar, a revered Hindu philosopher and Tamil poet from this area who lived in the 3rd or 4th century BCE. His magnum opus, known as Thirukkural (literally Holy Voice), is one of the most important and revered works in the Tamil language.
From where we caught the ferry, I did not have a good angle to take a picture of the statue. From the Vivekananda island, I could only get this rear / side view. I was planning to get to a better vantage point on the shore after returning from the island, but just as we returned from the island, it started raining heavily, and we barely made it to our car without getting drenched. After that, we decided to head back to Kerala, so I had to settle for these two shots of Thiruvallavar.
Image best downloaded and seen on a retina display.
From Saving the world from war to eating a good meal, anything could be his thought in that particular moment. No chance of knowing for sure.
Waist level shot.
the other parts of the series:
arslanahmedov.blogspot.com/2009/08/philosophers-breakfast...
limited edition 1/15
[...] Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere [...]
-- Quote by Blaise Pascal (French Mathematician, Philosopher and Physicist, 1623-1662)
Nikon D200, Samyang 8mm, f/3.5 fisheye, 8mm - f/8 - 1/500s - HDR 5xp +2/-2EV
Rome, Italy (May, 2016)
What you will find in Heaven
First attempt of the Philosopher
Trying to leave the desert
HKD
Die Erde befindet sich im Himmel
Der erste Versuch des Philosophen, die Wüste zu verlassen.
HKD
Wer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.
J.W.v.Goethe (Faust II)
Dear friends and visitors, this is the last picture from Flores. Now comes Christmas and after i invite you to travel along with me to some ancient places and volcanos of Java. Thank you so much for following so far.
I wish everyone of you happy holidays and - if you celebrate it - a merry Christmas!
Pelicans look like old Philosophers to me. The have such a serious look on their faces and the way the flock together, makes me think that they are busy with some very serious discussion.
This one was shot at the Alipore Zoological Gardens in Kolkata.
The zoo is in a pathetically bad shape today, with only a few creatures left for people to see. But I like going back to this place every winter to see the migratory birds that come. Sad thing is that, with pollution increasing day by day, the number of the birds flying in is decreasing very rapidly.