religion

Winter Programme 2026-7

7th Oct

Should there be any Limits on Free Speech?

Free speech is more than a legal right. It is the very essence of philosophy and democratic life. Far from being merely the freedom to cause offense, it is a positive, collaborative pursuit of truth. Without open dialogue with others philosophy is not possible. Yet free speech is not an absolute. There must be ethical boundaries. A speech that has no concern for the other can become harmful and violent. How do we create a community where all can speak their opinions freely with others and yet at the same time not cause harm and injury?

Do not however, lose yourself in the abstraction of freedom, in which you merely acknowledge that you are free to accept that only the rich man can speak freely. You are not an object of acceptance. You are a beast of complication, so show some teeth and ask when I am free, will I be the kind to use it to rule and become another monster? Or shall we instead share vulnerability and prove ourselves human?

This is a social and open discussion meeting. It is a nice opportunity to say ‘hello’ after the summer and to meet old and new members..

This meeting will take place in the Director’s Lounge at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham starting at 7 pm. Here is their website. https://www.everymantheatre.org.uk/

21st Oct

An Impossible Project

Thinking through the meaning of impossibility in the work of Maurice Blanchot. A Talk by Adam Potts

Maurice Blanchot remains one of the most compelling and enigmatic thinkers of the twentieth century. He writes philosophy, and about philosophy, but often this is done through the lens of literature. At the heart of Blanchot’s project is a thinking of the limit; Blanchot is interested in the way certain kinds of literature push thought to its limits via the limits of language.

If Blanchot’s work is a philosophy of anything, it is a philosophy of language and the ways in which different kinds of language offer different relations with the world. Whereas everyday language seeks to represent the world and philosophical language often seeks to secure meaning, literary language can subvert these responsibilities. In its most radical forms, literature can refuse representation, complicate identity and subjectivity, and even unsettle the self-identical nature of words themselves. Blanchot is interested in this capacity in literature – its ability to open a chasm within the “known” world and create an “atmosphere of uncertainty” (Blanchot, 1985,52). This uncertainty brings us to the limit of possibility and, ultimately, to the idea of impossibility.

Yet this uncertainty is not an invitation to despair or nihilism. Although Blanchot frequently circles negative themes like death, dying, and solitude, by The Infinite Conversation (1969) this uncertain region acquires a distinctly political dimension. This is where he explains how the “impossible” is ultimately “not there in order to make thought capitulate, but in order to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power” (Blanchot, 1969, 43). Literary language thus becomes a means of resisting the world and opening alternative relations with it.

The talk will follow this trajectory, introducing key themes in Blanchot’s work while offering an interpretation of it as a project driven by the pursuit of impossibility.

Dr Adam Potts is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University, UK. He specialises in the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, as well as aesthetics, specifically the philosophy of music, sound, and noise. His most recent book, Maurice Blanchot and the Aesthetics of Hope and Chance, explores the notions of hope and chance in Blanchot’s writing, while considering how his understanding of these concepts can illuminate their treatment by other thinkers. This puts Blanchot in contact with thinkers such as Yves Bonnefoy, Ernst Bloch, and Gabriel Marcel, as well as with the aesthetics of Dada and Surrealism, and the work of John Cage, improvised music, and dance.

11th Nov

The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective. A Talk by Gilbert Achcar

The genocidal war waged by Israel’s armed forces on Gaza was not an accidental vengeful overreaction to the reckless Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023. It was rather the culmination of a pattern of increasingly “disproportionate” retaliation that has been going along with Israel’s decades-long right-wing drift. The new catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinian people is far worse than the 1948 Nakba in lethality and destructiveness. It also bears a tremendous world-historical significance as first openly intentional genocidal war waged by an industrially advanced state since 1945 – moreover, with full U.S. participation and open support from the geopolitical West. The Gaza genocide has thus irredeemably exposed the double standard intrinsic to the Atlanticist pretence of a liberal rules-based international order.

Gilbert Achcar is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He grew up in Lebanon and has worked as researcher / teacher in Beirut, Paris and Berlin before moving to London in 2007. He is the author of several books published in several languages, including The Arabs and the Holocaust (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China, from Kosovo to Ukraine (2023); and most recently, The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective (2025). His website is at https://gilbert-achcar.net/

20th Nov

The Evolving Definition of Work in an Era of Automation. A Talk by Ian MacRae

AI is a tool that many people have found remarkably useful, but the rapid adoption of language models is challenging our view of work and unique human capabilities.

Human capabilities are defined as much by our limitations as our strengths, but in understanding how our unique biological, cognitive and physical limitations force us to focus, narrow attention, prioritize time, resources and relationships in fundamentally different ways than computers operate.

Understanding the uniqueness of human psychology is essential to understanding what constitutes good work, and what should be prioritized as human work. Psychological , frameworks like Self-Determination Theory highlight that human motivation relies on autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

To better understand the current areas of psychological thinking that might maintain relevance into the future of advancing automation tech, it is also useful to look back for common threads with earlier critiques of automation. John Ruskin’s work on defining the concept of good work during the 19th-century was developed during an early wave of automation. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin observed that cathedral stonemasons, despite not designing the overarching structures, exercised essential autonomy in their immediate tasks. Their individual creativity was evident in the rough edges, unique carvings, and imperfections that gave the structures lasting depth and beauty. The work was meaningful because it expressed agency and creativity at every scale, from individual carvings to the view of the whole cathedral. Meaningful work ultimately demands that individual human effort and creativity remain visible in the final results at every level.

Ian is a work psychologist whose research and writing focus on the relationship between people and the changing nature of work in an age of emerging technology. He is an award-winning author of books on workplace psychology and technology, including High Potential, Motivation and Performance, Dark Social, Myths of Social Media, Myths of Work and Web of Value, and have been published in a dozen languages.

His work explores how technology affects people, how people shape (and are shaped by) digital spaces, and the impact of technology on human communication, cognition and behaviour.

Ian currently serves on the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology committee and Research Board.

Ian is director of High Potential Psychology, founded in 2014 to conduct psychological research and develop workplace psychometric assessments, test developed by Ian have been completed over one million times.

2nd December

Max Weber and the Tragedy of Modernity. A Talk by Rhodri Lathey

Why has the modern West become so extraordinarily powerful, yet so uncertain about what human life is ultimately for? This talk explores Max Weber’s theory of modernity as a genealogy of Western civilisation: from the religious struggle to make suffering and injustice meaningful, through rationalisation, Calvinism and the rise of scientific and bureaucratic mastery, to the disenchantment of the modern world. It culminates in Weber’s tragedy of modernity: a civilisation increasingly capable of controlling the world, but without any universally authoritative answer to the question of what we should ultimately do with that power—or how we should live.

Rhodri Lathey has a joint honours degree in politics and philosophy from the University of Durham, and a graduate degree from the Politics Department in the University of Oxford. It’s at Oxford where, over 25 years ago, he came across Weber. He left academia shortly afterwards!

16th December

The Death Penalty. A Debate led by Paul Bridges

Humanity has employed the death penalty since the dawn of civilisation and throughout that period it has been used as a tool of punishment, retribution, deterrence, oppression and terror. So given its long history it is quite remarkable that the abolition movement only got going just over 150 years ago and that in that period over two-thirds of countries worldwide have completely abolished it and many others have abolished it in practice.

Despite this many people still support the death penalty, would like to see it restored where it has been abolished and some would even like to see its use extended to crimes other than certain classes of murder and they will cite a number of reasons for their stance.

Those on the abolitionist side of the debate tend to see the death penalty as barbaric, immoral, ineffective and fraught with danger. Where do you sit?

In our session we will look at:

Arguments for the death penalty
Arguments against
The status of the death penalty around the world including where it is used, for what crimes and the methods employed.

As well being a member and Treasurer of GPS, Paul Bridges is Chair of Amnesty International’s UK Anti-Death Penalty campaign group. He has spoken to many groups, schools and universities on the subject and, given that Amnesty opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, you will understand where Paul sits in this debate

All talks will take place 7 pm at the FCH Campus of the University of Gloucestershire in Rm. HC203. The social discussion, is at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. You find directions to the theatre at this link https://www.everymantheatre.org.uk/visit/. Professor’s Achcar’s talk will be online only. If you wish to attend this talk, and you are not an existing member, then please contact the email below.

You can find a map of the campus here: https://www.glos.ac.uk/visit-us/our-campuses/francis-close-hall-campus/

Contact email is: glosphilsoc@gmail.com

We are a local partner of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and these events are funded by a grant from them. Their website can be found here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/.

Autumn Programme 2025

1st October

Do We Need Billionaires?

Are billionaires the deserved winners of a meritocratic system, or a symptom of a broken social contract? This discussion delves into the profound ethical and political tensions at the heart of extreme wealth. Does the concentration of vast resources in private hands represent a just reward for innovation, or an unjust inequality that undermines the very idea of a common good? We will question whether such fortunes are compatible with democratic principles, or if they inevitably translate into undue political power. Join us to debate if the billionaire is an engine of progress we cannot live without, or a philosophical problem we can no longer ignore.

15th October

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: A Discussion with Dr Christoph Schuringa

Analytic philosophy is the leading form of philosophy in the English-speaking world. What explains its continued success? Christoph Schuringa argues that its enduring power can only be understood by examining its social history. Analytic philosophy tends to think of itself as concerned with eternal questions, transcending the changing scenes of history. It thinks of itself as apolitical. This book, however, convincingly shows that the opposite is true.

The origins of analytic philosophy are in a set of distinct movements, shaped by high-ly specific sets of political and social forces. Only after the Second World War were these disparate, often dynamic movements joined together to make ‘analytic philosophy’ as we know it. In the climate of McCarthyism, analytic philosophy was robbed of political force.

To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo. It may seem arcane and largely removed from the real world, but it is a crucial component in upholding liberalism, through its central role in elite educational institutions. As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.

Christoph Schuringa studied philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on the history of philosophy and on Marx and Marxism, and is associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University, London. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, New Left Review, European Journal of Philosophy and elsewhere.

29th Oct

What is a society without a state? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on social organisation. A Talk by Prof. Henry Somers-Hall

It is a common starting point when looking at societies to see them in terms of power – the more a society is able to marshal its resources, the more advanced the organisation of that society. In this talk, I want to explore the implications of this assumption for how we conceive of society. I also want to set out the argument by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for the claim that power, at least in the way we have traditionally understood it, is not central to social organisation, showing some of the possibilities that open up once we reject this assumption.

Henry Somers-Hall is a professor of philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on the interplay between 19^th century German idealism and the 20^th century French philosophical tradition. His most recent books are Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge University Press: 2022), The Deleuzian Mind (co-edited with Jeffrey Bell, Routledge: 2025)), and Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

12th Nov

The Meaning of Scholasticide: Colonial Strategies and Palestinian Resistance. A talk by Dr. Nadia Naser-Najjab

Most Palestinians involved in the education system face challenges of considerable scope and intensity. These obstacles have significant impact on educational development, attendance and learning outcomes. Israel’s relentless efforts to destroy Palestinian education fall under the range of actions prohibited by the Genocide Convention, and more specifically ‘scholasticide’. However, Israeli colonial strategies to constrain and limit the development of the Palestinian education substantially predate the ongoing war, and indeed contemporary wars, in the Gaza Strip, being concretely embodied by Israeli practices across historical Palestine. I will demonstrate this by considering Palestinian in broad perspective and over a long period of time, albeit with particular emphasis on Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian higher education system. In doing so, it will refer to the categorisation of Palestinians and the fragmentation of the land to enable Israel control Palestinian education, censor their narrative and scrutinise students and teachers. I will also show how Palestinians, despite the hardship, do not lose hope, remain resilient and never give up.

Dr. Nadia Naser-Najjab is Senior lecturer in Palestine Studies, European Centre for Palestine Studies- Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor, Birzeit University, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies and the MA program in Arab Contemporary Studies. Nadia holds a PhD in Middle East Studies form the University of Exeter.

Her most recent book is Covid-19 in Palestine: The Settler Colonial Context, Bloomsbury Publishing 2024.

She also published Dialogue in Palestine: The People-to-People Diplomacy Programme and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

Her research is based on first-hand experience and original data collection.

26th Nov

The ideology of economic growth, and its philosophical construction. A talk by Dr Gareth Dale

The ‘growth paradigm’ — i.e. the postulate that economic growth is good, imperative, essentially continuous (even limitless), and the principal remedy for a litany of social problems — is ubiquitous today. For all their differences, Liz Truss and Keir Starmer shared the (specifically triplicate) mantra: ‘growth growth growth.’ Yet in historical terms the domination of growth ideology is recent. The growth paradigm is unique to modernity. This paper will briefly touch upon what is involved in the suggestion that economic growth be understood as ideology, before, in its main part, turning to examine the seventeenth-century emergence and consolidation of growth ideology, paying particular attention to philosophers and economic thinkers. In concluding, the question of ‘degrowth’ will be broached.

Gareth is Associate Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences. He worked at Birkbeck, the LSE, and Swansea University before joining Brunel University in 2005. His most recent books are the edited collections Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (Haymarket 2021) and Exploring the Thought of Karl Polanyi (Agenda 2019). In 2016 he published Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (Columbia UP) and Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique (Pluto), and Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (Manchester UP), and a critical appraisal of ‘Green Growth’ strategies (Zed Books), and The Politics of East European Area Studies (co-edited; Routledge). His earlier books were on Karl Polanyi (Polity, 2010), the political economy of Eastern Europe (Pluto), migrant labour in the European Union (Berg), and a trilogy on East Germany: its economic history, protest movements, and 1989 revolution (Peter Lang, Routledge, and Manchester UP).

10th Dec

Mattering, Sincerity and Trustworthiness. A talk by Prof. Philip Goodchild

For a philosopher, much contemporary communication lacks substance: it directs attention to that which does not matter, its concerns are often insincere, and its claims are untrustworthy. So what is substance? Instead of evaluating things by their price, their impact, their likes, or their fulfilment of arbitrary objectives, it is possible instead to take a philosophical orientation from these problems: what really matters, what is truly sincere, and what is ultimately trustworthy?

These are not simply problems we can formulate ourselves. They happen to us in any crisis which provokes thought; they are a reason for thinking. This talk will explore what might be meant by the mattering, sincerity, and trustworthiness of things themselves by describing how such problems arise in contemporary life.

Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of several books, including Theology of Money (2007), the Credit and Faith trilogy (2020-21), and Rethinking the Existence of God: Renewing Metaphysics after the Critical Turn (forthcoming) – the Appendix forming the basis for this talk.

All talks will take place at the FCH Campus of the University of Gloucestershire in Rm. HC203 except the social discussion, which is at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham.

You can find a map of the campus here: https://www.glos.ac.uk/visit-us/our-campuses/francis-close-hall-campus/

Contact email is: glosphilsoc@gmail.com

We are a local partner of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and these events are funded by a grant from them. Their website can be found here: https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/.