This is my first vlog. I discuss how recent reports from think-tanks and discussions with major employers point to a re-evaluating of the humanities – not along the lines of their inherent or social value (that is a separate argument) but along purely monetary lines.
References:
Future...
Our modern economies revolve around money. The health of the economy, in one way or another, is measured in terms of sums of money. When people consider their futures, they think about the money (or lack of it) that will be involved.
So what makes money? We’ll leave aside the trivial answer: mints or...
Hi. I’m Carl Gombrich. This blog contains my personal views and thoughts.
So far, I have studied and taught maths, physics and philosophy. I have degrees in these things. I have also studied and taught music and was a professional opera singer for a while, having trained at the National Opera Studio in the UK, where I was the Royal Opera House scholar.
I work at UCL, the great university in London, directing and setting up a new degree Arts and Sciences (BASc). It’s a wonderful job, full of intellectual and practical challenge and excitement.
Currently, I mostly read political economy and stuff on interdisciplinarity and the philosophy of education. I also had a longish period when I was interested in religion, particularly mysticism, and read in this area. I have published a paper on mysticism and music called ‘Expressions of Inexpressible Truths’ which is to be reprinted in a twenty-year commemorative edition of the World of Music.
I hope to publish more on different things, related to my work and further interests, in the coming years - though my main focus is on setting up the Arts and Sciences degree and on teaching. My feeling is that we are at the beginning of substantial changes in academia and in our relation to knowledge in general (these sorts of things I write about on the blog) and I am interestsed to question my relationship to writing and reading as part of these shifts. In any event, it is a positive development that where one used to be chided for being ‘a perpetual student’, one is now lauded as ‘a lifelong learner’ and admired as showing flexibility, adaptability and an intuitive ability to negotiate the ever-changing modern age.
I think people can change enormously over their lifetimes: emotionally, politically, artistically, intellectually, and the rest.
At some point – and up to now – these have been some of the thinkers and doers that have shaped my life in some way. The following are listed by category and in rough chronological order, according to when I encountered them.
School teachers: Philip Pullman, Peter Malin
Fiction Writers/Poets: Homer, Dickens, Hermann Hesse, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Baudelaire, George Herbert, Shakespeare
Philosophers: Plato, Plotinus, Bertrand Russell, Pascal, Hume, Bergson, Wittgenstein, A W Moore, Graham Priest, George Boolos, Martha Nussbaum
Relgious writers: Augustine, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, St Thomas a Kempis, Nicholas of Cusa
Scientists/Mathematicians: Morris Klein, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies, Einstein, Feynman, Cantor, Godel
Musicians: The Clash, Ian Dury, Al Green, Chopin, Bach, Stevie Wonder, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers, Horovitz, Richter, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Gene Harris, Jussi Bjoerling, Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Cesare Siepi, George London
Politicians/Leaders/Business people/Sports people: Warren Buffett, Eric Cantona, Arsene Wenger, Michael Johnson, Barack Obama, Usain Bolt
and of course many friends and members of my family.
I am currently using this blog to focus on issues in education, interdisciplinarity and economics. Below is some more personal stuff and some other stuff which I am happy to share with those who are interested
