Submission Date

Please submit your blogs as a set, including a concluding blog and preferably arranged first to last, as a hard copy to the school office for Friday 11th January 2013 (for full time students) or Monday14th January 2013 (part-time students). I will only mark hard copy submissions.

I hope you have enjoyed the course and remember we continue next semester with the second part of the critical thinking module in preparation for your dissertations. Happy holidays!

Aman has charts!

Just in case any of you are having difficulty finding Spengler's charts, Aman from Studio 8 photographed them yesterday.
Thanks to Aman you will find them below:
 
They have been posted in the facebook group. For those that don't have access here is the link:https://www.dropbox.com/s/ea0gtot9rfdi0sp/Diagram%20Photos2.pdf 

Session 10

For this session I want you to familiarize yourselves with the argument of Oswald Spengler in The Decline of The West. The best way to do this might be to study the three charts at the end of Volume One; Contemporary Spiritual Epochs, Contemporary Culture Epochs and Contemporary Political Epochs. Unfortunately they are too large for my our scanner so I have to ask you to forage for them on the internet.
Secondly and by way of contrast, I want you to read almost any article by John Lanchester, a regular and readable contributor to many journals, especially (my favourite) the London Review of Books.
Spengler postulates an argument that even if it were to be true, is most unhelpful, but it does ask you to confront a fatalistic nihilism that pervaded an area of thought between the wars, and might readily be brought to an understanding of the work of Mies van de Rohe.
Lets see what you might make of both characters and their opposite viewpoints.