I sat down late last week with Professor Laurence Hemming for a discussion on the meaning of democracy - a subject which has obvious immediate importance in the UK (with a general election not far away) but which, I am sure you will agree, is one of the genuine problématiques - if you will excuse the posh word - of our age. The conversation is wide ranging, and covers the origins of democracy in Ancient Greece, aspects of its philology and conceptual grounds, its contemporary deterioration, and its ongoing value. We also cover Jacques Brel (with apologies to the great man for misremembering the details of one of his songs), football, liberalism, Boris Johnson, and elements of the philosophy of geography and the meaning of the nation.
This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews which I plan to release here, with the aim of exploring some of the themes which I write about with people I think have interesting things to say. If you enjoy it, please share (and subscribe if you haven’t already) using the buttons at the bottom of the post.
Professor Laurence Hemming is Director of the Knapp Foundation (where I am also a Fellow), and is now an Honorary Professor at Lancaster University in the UK, having joined Lancaster in 2008. Prior to that he held senior research positions in the University of London (UK) and at KU Leuven (Belgium). His doctorate is from Cambridge and he holds other degrees from Oxford.
Among his published works are: Heidegger’s Atheism (Notre Dame, 2002), Postmodernity’s Transcending (Notre Dame, 2005) and Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism (Northwestern, 2013). With Bogdan Costea, in 2017 he published a translation of Ernst Jünger’s 1932 The Worker, and with Aaron Turner he is currently translating a volume of the later Heidegger’s lectures on the Anaximander Fragment. He has written and published widely in (mainly) German philosophy but has also edited and published numerous books, articles and translations in theology, liturgy, politics and classics.
The Meaning of Democracy with Professor Laurence Hemming (Video Interview)