Ain't this cool? An illustration of one of my talks, from the journal of Lou Niestadt, the talented Dutch writer and illustrator, who came to one of my talks at the Happinez festival. Thanks so much, Lou, I love it!

I went to the Proms last night, and saw a wonderful performance of Les Illuminations, Britten's musical rendition of Rimbaud's poems, by the singer Ian Bostridge. It was the first time I've come across Rimbaud's verse, I'm embarrassed to say, and I loved it.

This is the second part of a piece, the first part is here.

Max Weber was what William James would call a ‘sick soul’ - by which I mean that, like James and Tolstoy, he was subject to depressions, and constantly asked himself if what he did had any positive meaning or value. The difference between him and these other two writers is that they emerged from their acute depressive crises by turning to God. Weber, by contrast, turned to science.

I keep coming back to this amazing lecture by Max Weber, which he gave in 1918, two years before he died, called Science as a Vocation. In it, he talks about the polytheism of modernity, how various gods and demons ‘strive to gain power over our lives’, and we have to decide which god to serve, and obey ‘the demon which holds the very fibres of his life’.

Here's the psychologist William James, writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience, on the transformative power of forgiveness, tenderness and non-violence:

Hi, here's a correction regarding a quote in Philosophy for Life (the correction has already been made in the new edition of the book). In chapter eight, I misquoted an interview by Werner Erhard (the founder of erhard seminars training) taken from the wonderful Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self.

Today's the launch day of the new pocket-book edition of Philosophy for Life!  It's smaller, slimmer and yellower than the first edition, so easily fits in your pocket like an ancient handbook! It's also cheaper. But for a few lucky readers, it will be entirely free.I have five free copies to give away, to the first five people to email me the answers to the questions below at jules dot evans at mac dot com:

Here is a photo of me at the Night of Philosophy in Amsterdam, two Fridays ago. I was pretty ill with the flu - I think that podium was the only thing holding me up! I'm doing a 'sermon' in Utrecht this Sunday evening, by the way. Details here.

In this series of posts, I'm going to explore a figure who appeared to me in my dreams when I was about 20 and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'm going to suggest that this figure helps us unlock one of the functions of the arts - to hold a mirror up to a civilisation and show it all that it's forgotten or left out.

From Carlo Ginzberg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:

I'm enjoying Virginia Nicholson's book, Among The Bohemians, with its tales of bohemian experiments in living at the beginning of the 20th century. I particularly enjoyed David Garnett's account of the strange love triangle between the poet Robert Graves, his mistress the poet Laura Riding, and the young poet Geoffrey Phibbs:

Last night was the first session in the new Philosophy For Life course at Queen Mary, University of London. It was a full-house, with the Lock-Keeper's Cottage proving a great venue, and just about fitting everyone in. The audience was roughly one third undergrads, one third postgrads, and one third members of the public. Huge thanks to Rupert Jones for helping me out. Below are some photos from the event.

Today, some archeologists excavated the skeleton of Crookback Dick, also known as Richard III:

I'm reading John Carey's book, The Intellectual and the Masses, and enjoying it. I came across this awful review of the book by Roger Kimball, the cultural conservative, who completely fails to see the book's merits. In it, he quotes Hannah Arendt approvingly:

Here are some nice pics of the Brandstof / School of Life event in Amsterdam a fortnight ago, by the Brandstof photographer. More here.

Our lives are economies of pleasure, made of habitual ways of trying to feel good. If we want to change ourselves we have, as it were, to reform our habitual structures of pleasure and build new structures. We must change the ways that we get pleasure, and perhaps deny ourselves pleasure in the habitual forms in which we get it, in order to get pleasure in new ways.

Here are some pics of me speaking at Woking Library: