Brian O'Connor
Special guest
Brian O'Connor is professor of philosophy at University College Dublin. He is the author of_ Adorno_ ,_ Adorno's Negative Dialectic and _Idleness: A Philosophical Essay.
Brian O'Connor has been a guest on 1 episode.
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Episode 122: Idleness, with Brian O'Connor
September 1st, 2018 | 52 mins 16 secs
For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In "Idleness", the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor argues that the case against an indifference to work and effort is flawed--and that idle aimlessness may instead allow for the highest form of freedom.