Today at 4pm it will again be the seminar in Philosophy. With the morning coffee I read the paper to be discussed. This time it is "Philosophy and critical theory " by Herbert Marcuse. The text is written in 1930's Germany, and it is chilling to read when one knows what happened after that. Marcuse is looking for ways to create a better society, one where the economical production would serve the needs and goals of free liberated people, instead of people serving the needs of industrial production. I think most of the people feel that they are aligned with such a goal, but the devil is in the details; different groups of people might have conflicting ideas on what a "better society" is, or how to make it come true. Some say we need less government regulation to liberate the individuals, while some other people see that we need more government regulation to control big companies so that they can't oppress ordinary people as much as they'd like to do to maximize the private profit for the shareholders. Oh, but this is largely off-topic for today's seminar. But, I mean, I'm kind of a waiting to get to write a couple of blog posts about philosophy, and possibly also political philosophy, but the thing is that I'd like to discuss them in detail, not just throwing some vague metaphors. And it takes time to write a disciplined well formulated understandable text, especially if I try to say anything else than just echoing this or that widely adopted view.