Ross Sinclair

For 2500 years of philosophical time human thought has traced a path along the spine of the Rosneath Peninsula – almost an island – on the Firth of Clyde. This landscape now wears the ring of the nuclear submarine bases at Coulport and Faslane encircling Loch Long and Gare Loch.

As we walk this route today, we navigate a constellation of philosophical ideas – from the Pre-Socratics, to Plato, Aristotle, and beyond, seeking meaning on an imperfect and fractured journey toward understanding in the 21^stCentury. But we fail. This landscape, beautiful, sublime yet lethally charged – defies philosophical logic. A bucolic, pastoral vision doubling as a storehouse of Armageddon, only an hour away, almost visible from the 5^th floor windows of this building.

Where are ideas of humanity, compassion, love, kindness and joy today? They cower.  

Current Philosophical position: Enjoy it while you can, celebrate life, don’t wait until tomorrow, do it now…who knows what the future will bring?  

A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy (2019), Audible Audiobook – Unabridged 

UK, Penguin Audio (Publisher) 

A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity’s dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them too.

David Graeber and David Wengrow,The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) London: Allen Lane. (an imprint of Penguin Books)

Describing the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development from primitivism to civilisation Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. 

Benjamin Myers, Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place/Stories Carved from the Land (2019) UK: Elliot and Thompson Ltd.

Benjamin Myers asks: are unremarkable places made remarkable by the minds that map them? Seeking a new life and finding solace in nature’s power of renewal, Myers excavates stories both human and elemental. The result is a lyrical and unflinching investigation into nature, literature, history, memory and the meaning of place in modern Britain.