Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was a British essayist, journalist, and novelist. Orwell is most famous for his dystopian works of fiction, but many of his essays and other books have remained popular as well. His body of work provides one of the twentieth century’s most trenchant and widely recognized critiques of totalitarianism. This article focuses on philosophical topics and questions in political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, and aesthetics that Orwell dealt with (...) in his writing. Continue reading Orwell, George →. (shrink)

The core of George Orwell’s novel 1984 is the debate between Winston Smith and O’Brien in the cells of the Ministry of Love. It is natural to read this debate as a debate between a realist and an anti-realist. I offer a few representative passages from the book that demonstrate, I believe, that if this is not the only possible way to understand the debate, it is one very natural way.RésuméLe coeur de la nouvelle de George Orwell, 1984, (...) est le débat entre Winston Smith et O’Brien dans les cellules du Ministère de l’Amour. Il est naturel de lire ce débat comme un débat entre un réaliste et un anti-réaliste. Je présente quelques passages représentatifs du livre qui démontrent, je crois, que si ce n’est pas la seule manière possible de comprendre le débat, c’est une manière très naturelle de le faire. (shrink)

This article discusses George Orwell’s attitude to Zionism and the Palestine question, a controversial and emotional subject in left-wing circles in his time and since. There have been a number of studies on Orwell’s attitude to Jews and anti-Semitism and some of these have touched upon Orwell’s approach to Zionism. However, his stance on the Palestine question specifically deserves further exposition. This is so, not least because on this subject too Orwell’s views—largely anti-Zionist—differed from the prevailing, passionate beliefs of (...) most left-wing intellectuals of his time, including some of his closest friends and political allies. Furthermore, Orwell’s views were expressed at a time when the Palestine conflict peaked during the last decade of the British Mandate with results which resound to this day. (shrink)

Le coeur de la nouvelle de George Orwell, 1984, est le débat entre Winston Smith et O’Brien dans les cellules du Ministère de l’Amour. Il est naturel de lire ce débat comme un débat entre un réaliste (concernant la nature de la vérité) et un anti-réaliste. Je présente quelques passages représentatifs du livre qui démontrent, je crois, que si ce n’est pas la seule manière possible de comprendre le débat, c’est une manière très naturelle de le faire.

P McKenzie; George Orwell, ‘Seeing’ and ‘Saying’: a reply to Francis Dunlop, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 255–264.

George Orwell perceived the possibility of a postwar united Europe, based on regional integration along social-democratic lines, as a means of survival in a world struggle rather than as a preamble to peace. This was the logical conclusion of his understanding of political realism: his endorsement of its assumption that violence is endemic to social life and that the force-wielding sovereign cannot be done away with. Yet Orwell also had reservations about realism. He argued that a purely realist analysis (...) that was not normatively connected to any values outside itself would go astray because analysts would be unable to factor in their own positions and would thus lose the analytic distance from their objects of study. Orwell was thus as suspicious of a politics managed by experts as of the utopian anticipation of a violence-free world. His world-view, rooted in realist necessity while leaving room for the values of democracy and socialism, offered a vision of a postwar united Europe that fostered t... (shrink)

John Rodden is the author of an important study of Orwell that was published in 1989 and titled The Politics of Literary Reputation. That study integrated modes of analysis drawn from literary stud...

Este trabalho estabelece um diálogo entre o discurso filosófico e literário. Os autores que fundamentam esta tentativa são John Dewey e George Orwell. Pensamento Reflexivo e Comunicação são os conceitos aqui empregados. A assim chamada novilíngua tem, na obra de Orwell, a pretensão de restringir o próprio pensamento individual manipulando o processo social da comunicação. Discutir sobre a possibilidade de uma manipulação em massa da mentalidade conduz a um exame crítico das noções presentes no pensamento deweyano sobre educação.

“Orwell was only in the loosest sense a political thinker,” or so Glenn Burgess begins this new study of the man and his work. And he quickly adds that “still less was he a political theorist or po...

Regardless of its ontological status and seemingly subsidiary role, the beyond—real, oneiric, imaginary, or otherworldly—constitutes, I intend to argue, an indispensable and complementary component of any dystopian reality. Paradoxically, it may be claimed that what lies outside a given dystopia—beyond its impassable boundaries—determines, ultimately, whether we deal with the Orwellian or the Hollywood type of "bad world."1 Contrary to the latter, the former systematically compromises and eliminates one kind of the beyond after another, leaving its inhabitants with neither space nor (...) time nor discourse that could allow them to imagine that they are behind the confines of dystopia. No matter how far Winston Smith... (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines the connections between social perfectibility and individual identity through George Orwell's famous non-place "Oceania" in 1984 (1949). It is argued that "Ingsoc" Party members see reality filtered through "collective solipsism," which is a mirage that is superimposed upon the material state of affairs in individual perception by the augmentation of every individual's environment with constant feedback from the social superstructure. Thus, perceptions, memories, and possibly even personalities are constructed situationally as fit for the superstructure. Due to (...) the constantly intensifying regress of cognitive and material enabling factors, this "collective delusion" will detach itself from the material realm completely in 2050 when individual consciousness fully dissolves into Big Brother's super-mind. 1984 thus depicts a dystopian-utopian, "blackwhite" society on the "event horizon" to a "singularity," which will emerge when the state or collective becomes an absolute and no traces of private life remain. (shrink)

_Orwell's Faded Lion_ traces the history of Britain from the end of the Second World War, during the darkest days of which George Orwell wrote _The Lion and the Unicorn_, calling for a British revolution, to the present. The book confronts the actual direction taken by British society against the background of the high hopes of the generation that survived the war. The book also considers Britain alongside its European neighbours, drawing upon personal experiences of living and travelling widely (...) in Europe, as well as experience of left-wing party politics and of the Northern Ireland situation in the 1980s. (shrink)

O texto apresenta a apropriação feita pela extrema-direita brasileira ao redor da obra de George Orweel, em especial, de '1984' e 'Animal Farm'. Argumentamos que a adjudicação 'conservadora' é inadequada para tal apropriação. Os intelectuais e editoriais implicados na circulação atual de Orwell nas redes bolsonaristas permite ver como clássicos do pensamento conservador ocidental são aqui canonizados em chave, mais que conservadora, reacionária. Além disso, o duelo de distopias empunhados pelos ideólogos da extrema-direita dá também acesso a uma indústria (...) cultural, na qual um sem-fim de produtos culturais são vendidos para forjar e cativar uma plateia potencial reacionária. (shrink)

The hero of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four defends a seemingly modest claim: "There was truth and there was untruth."1 It may be incoherent to deny this, but, as the novel shows, those who set no store in truth will not be browbeaten by contradictions. Orwell's last novel reflects his conviction that a commitment to "objective truth" was fast disappearing from the world—a prospect that troubled him more than bombs.2 Truth meant little in this "age of lies" and was neither (...) the aim nor horizon of intellectual debate (CW, 17, p. 11). Standards of rationality were opportunistically enlisted and jettisoned in the service of particular ends. Politics, he concluded, was "a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and .. (shrink)

The article offers a philosophical rereading of George Orwell’s novel 1984 in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, in particular after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. In recent decades, the dystopia of the English writer has become not only a model of literary criticism of totalitarianism but also the subject of constant falsifications and censorship for Russian propagandists. This study aims to clarify the primary philosophical content of Orwell’s novel and its heuristic potency to expose (...) the sociopolitical situation in contemporary Russia. The author of the article turns to biographical descriptions and philosophical interpretations of the novel in the works of leading Western scholars to finally draw reasonable analogies between the dystopian world of 1984 and the contemporary Russian Federation. (shrink)

This paper first considers and rebuts George Orwell's case against international sport. He argues both from general principles and specific examples that international sporting contests lead to org...

Occasionally literary and philosophical metaphors and images enter the domain of popular discourse and consciousness. Images in Uncle Tom ' s Cabin of humane and oppressed blacks contrasted to inhumane slave owners and overseers shaped many people ' s negative images of slavery. And in nineteenth century Russia, Chernyshevsky ' s novel What is to be Done? shaped a generation of young Russian ' s views of oppressive features of their society, including V. I. Lenin who took the question posed (...) by Chernyshevsky ' s novel as the title of one of his early revolutionary treatises. In the twentieth century, George Orwell ' s vision of totalitarian society in his novel 1984 has had a major impact on how many people see, understand, and talk about contemporary social trends. { 1 } Subsequently, Herbert Marcuse ' s analyses and images of a " onedimensional man " in a " one - dimensional society " shaped many young radicals ' ways of seeing and experiencing life in advanced capitalist society during the 1960s and 1970s -- though to a more limited extent and within more restricted circles than Orwell ' s writings which are among the most widely read and discussed works of the century. (shrink)

George Orwell wrote to Roger Senhouse upon completion of 1984 that the work was designed in part “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.” The implications for social and political philosophy have furnished a generation of readers with frightening realizations. I will attempt in what follows to show that the implications for epistemology and metaphysics are equally central to the book’s message, and equally discomfitting to philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. The book connects totalitarianism with the (...) entire British empiricist tradition from George Berkeley to A. J. Ayer, primarily by disclosing the totalitarian implications of Berkeley’s philosophy. The result is a vision of empiricism as the intellectual foundation for totalitarianism. (shrink)

This chapter delineates how despite their received status as almost writerly adversaries, George Orwell and W. H. Auden both adopt in their work a carnophallogocentric stance towards vegetarians that feminizes and denigrates those who choose not to consume meat. Whether because they deviate insidiously from the ordinary decency that will prove humanity’s salvation, or because they strive in futility towards a purity that can only be enforced through dictatorial means, vegetarians serve for both writers throughout the late 1930s not (...) only as obstacles to fascism’s defeat, but as minor-key exemplars of some of its core tendencies. Orwell’s and Auden’s writings of the 1930s thus alert us, through their carnophallagocentrism, both to the co-constitutive nature of oppressive hierarchies and to how our propensity to frame such hierarchies in strictly anthropic terms can serve to reassert the normative model of subjectivity that virtually ensures their perpetuation. (shrink)

Global Economy, Global Justice explores a vital question that is suppressed in most economics texts: "what makes for a good economic outcome?" Neoclassical theory embraces the normative perspective of "welfarism" to assess economic outcomes. This volume demonstrates the fatal flaws of this perspective--flaws that stem from objectionable assumptions about human nature, society and science. Exposing these failures, the book obliterates the ethical foundations of global neoliberalism. George DeMartino probes heterodox economic traditions and philosophy in search of an ethically viable (...) alternative to welfarism. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, DeMartino proposes the egalitarian principle of the "global harmonization of capabilities" to guide economics. This principle provides a basis for resisting oppression the world over while nevertheless demanding respect for cultural diversity. DeMartino puts this principle to work adjudicating contemporary debates over global policy regimes, and completes thebook with a set of deeply egalitarian global policies for the year 2025. Global Economy, Global Justice 's engaging prose will appeal to those seeking to understand the intersection between economics and political philosophy. Its focus on the normative foundations of contemporary policy disputes makes it unique in the literature on globalization. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.