1984 and Philosophy

Although the year 1984 is hurtling back into the distant past, Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to have a huge readership and to help shape the world of 2084. Sales of Orwell’s terrifying tale have recently spiked because of current worries about alternate facts, post-truth, and fake news.

1984 and Philosophy brings together brand new, up-to-the-minute thinking by philosophers about Nineteen Eighty-Four as it relates to today’s culture, politics, and everyday life. Some of the thinking amounts to thoughtcrime, but we managed to sneak it past the agents of the Ministry of Truth, so this is a book to be read quickly before the words on the page mysteriously transform into something different.

Who’s controlling our lives and are they getting even more levers to control us? Is truth objective or just made up? What did Orwell get right—and did he get some things wrong? Are social media opportunities for liberation or instruments of oppression? How can we fight back against totalitarian control? Can Big Brother compel us to love him? How does the language we use affect the way we think? Do we really need the unifying power of hate? Why did Orwell make Nineteen Eighty-Four so desperately hopeless? Can science be protected from poisonous ideology? Can we really believe two contradictory things at once? Who surveils the surveilors?

Ezio Di Nucci is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Before that he was Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Duiburg-Essen in Germany. He is the co-editor with Filippo Santoni de Sio of Drones and Responsibility (Routledge, 2016). He has also written several books, including Ethics without Intention (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Mindlessness (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Stefan Storrie, currently an independent scholar, has held the position of Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. He is the author of a book on Berkeley's Three Dialogues being released by Routledge in 2018. He has also edited a collection on the Three Dialogues, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in early 2018.