Andrew Benjamin is currently Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology Sydney. He has taught philosophy at universities in Australia and the United Kingdom.
For Descartes thinking was all; to be human was to be a ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans). Pierre Gassendi, writing in the 1640s, attempted to counter the exclusion of the body in his reply to Descartes’ Meditations. Gassendi’s proposition was stark: ambulo ergo sum (‘I walk therefore I am’).
The recent translation of Franz Hessel's Walking in Berlin provides another occasion for walking to return as a topic-a topic that has acquired a new significance in an era in which terms such as 'lockdown' have become a sort of commonplace. Originally published in 1929, it inspired, in part, Walter Benjamin's development of his own conception of the 'flaneur'. In addition, Hessel's work provided a decisive element of the thinking that prompted Benjamin's The Arcades…
The future's inevitability makes it a matter of continual concern. (A concern, more significantly, that is played out in divergent ways; a state of affairs already signalled by the interplay of the inevitable and the continuous.) If the future's inevitability works as a continual refrain, what then of the future? What would comprise an account of its presence? What is it to think the future? Allowing for the future - though not just as a…
