How easy it is to feel disenchanted by modern day living: credit crunches, wars, global warming, and unemployment, disasters, reality TV, isolation by technology. Writer and theologian Mark Vernon offers an antidote --considering that if we want to solve the problems of the present, there is no better resource than the past. Vernon engages in discussion this evening with film maker (director of the award0winning Zizek!) and writer Astra Taylor as they apply the philosophy of the ancients to our twenty-first-century existence.
Mark Vernon is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster in the UK as well as a regular contributor to BBC radio, TV and “The Guardian". He began his professional life as a priest in the Church of England, and after a crisis of faith, was eventually led to the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, which he felt offered a different way of life. Vernon now writes on philosophy and edits a series called "The Art of Living." He is the author of numerous books, including Plato’s Podcasts: The Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at BirkbeckCollege, University of London.
Astra Taylor holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the NewSchool for Social Research and has been an instructor in sociology departments at the University of Georgia and State University of New York where she has taught classes on social theory, globalization, and the sociology of film. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly Review, The Nation, Adbusters, Salon, The Baffler, and Bomb Magazine. She is the director of Zizek!, a feature documentary about the world’s most famous philosopher. She is the author of Examined Life: Exursions with Contemporary Thinkers.
