Dr. Peter Thompson
A little bit of a wildcard, but the title of the paper sounded intriguing, and we thought you needed a bit of good old fashioned materialist philosophy to keep your education well rounded. Dike was reading the Guardian one afternoon and came across an interesting little article by Dr. Thompson on Ernst Bloch's atheism. A few emails later, and here we are ...
If you'd like to know more about who Ernst Bloch is, best go here.
In his own words:
"My main area of research at present is in the field of Ernst Bloch studies, encompassing not only his period in the GDR from 1949 to 1961 - when he was Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig University and centrally involved in oppositional Marxist activities of the Harich-Gruppe of the mid 1950s – but also in the philosophical impact of his theories of Hope, Utopia and his view of the central role of faith in social transformation. I have also now established The Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at Sheffield.
Since 1990 I have published on the history of ideas, political developments in the GDR and post-unification Germany, Brecht, ecology and philosophy, and the PDS/Linke. In 2005 I published The Crisis of the German Left, which deals with the history of Stalinism in the workers´ movement and its continuing influence on the post-unification Left. I am also one of the founding editors of the journal DEBATTE, which has been running since 1993 and deals with German and wider Central European Affairs.
Future projects include a monograph on the `Privatisation of Hope´ - which will deal with the relevance of Bloch´s ideas in the context of the globalisation of the economy but also of the atomisation of communal values. I recently published a chapter on Wolf Biermann using Blochian analysis.
In addition I am a media commentator on German affairs, having appeared in several Radio 4 programmes and a Channel 4 documentary on British attitudes to the Third Reich. I have also published a Face to Faith column in the Guardian on Ernst Bloch and Atheism."
Links:
Articles:
Face to Faith: Ernst Bloch and Atheism (The Guardian)