About 2400 years ago Plato internalized the debating voices he heard around him in Athens and invented the philosophical dialogue. We grateful heirs to his dialectical way of thinking have turned those voices inside out. An increasingly plausible Socrates, Dr. Soderholm has been at the centre of this emerging web of intellectual activity as he attempts to play the ancient roles of midwife, gadfly, and torpedo fish.

Dialogic Imaginations is a work-in-progress guided by the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

‘A way of happening, a mouth’
Kyle Blaus-Plissner & Dr. Soderholm
I am not keeping a journal—I have considered a memoir, despite being rather young to write one. On the one hand, I decided after I finished contract teaching that I no longer wanted a life that was worth writing about...
In Reflection
Moses May-Hobbs & Cal Hewitt
Spinoza was, on all surviving accounts, a good – if unexceptional – optician, a better maker of lenses than he was a theorist of them. The lens and its trickery are slightly thorny for empiricism at large: at once revelatory and deceptive...
To Autumn
Henry Baxter & Dr. Soderholm
Let us speak of death, poetry, and transfiguration. Today in Hyde Park I showed you an oak leaf in its death throes, flaming into beauty one last time. I gave you a botanical explanation about why leaves turn color in Autumn—sometimes I still prefer the American “Fall,” partly for its biblical and Miltonic associations...
Woolf, Wolves, and Us
Melkon Charchoglyan & Dr. Soderholm
I love the dinner scene in To the Lighthouse. How everyone gropes to understand one another but never quite does; the resulting tension; the huge distance between the characters' perspicacious thoughts, feelings, and the disappointing or reticent way those thoughts and feelings play out in the real world...
Le mot juste
Grace Clover & Dr. Soderholm
One aspect of Flaubert's description of Madame Bovary's husband, Charles, has stayed with me. Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought...
Uncivil Wars
Lyall Rosgill & Dr. Soderholm
A spate of iconoclastic protests and demands for social reform this year has eventually culminated in a letter—a remarkably controversial letter, signed by over 150 academics, writers and activists...
Making Waves
Cal Hewitt & Dr. Soderholm
I would like to argue that the fluke of the blue whale pictured above is—from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, if not cosmic harmony—both a necessity and, well, a fluke...
Time to be Human
Amelia Liddell & Dr. Soderholm
Sometimes thinking in geological or even better cosmic time sorts me out. If the Earth were a 24-hour clock, Homo sapiens have been around for about two seconds...
The Art of Danse Macabre
Cal Hewitt & Dr. Soderholm
As the entire world seems swept away by one dreadful thing, the little black death of our time, I would like to engage you on the subject of Art...
'Tis new to thee
Leandra Bernstein & Dr. Soderholm
As I become more and more like Prospero—craggy, crabby, losing my magic—I sometimes reflect on the meaning of The Tempest and the several sea-changes it has undergone in my evolving, dying brain...
Who's Afraid of Jacob Rees‐Mogg?
Charles Noble & Dr. Soderholm
With twelve days until Jacob Rees-Mogg visits our school to give a talk, my nerves are not good...
The Worship Business
Zoë Abrams & Dr. Soderholm
Freud argues that religious feelings and sentiments--and especially the need for an all- protective father--are the reasons why people seem to believe in supernatural beings and engage in religious practices...
The Victim
Alice Abrams & Dr. Soderholm
We live in an age of victimhood. Political turmoil, an aging population and skyrocketing rates of mental illness seem to subject almost everyone to some kind of unjust misfortune...
The Importance of Being Wicked
Ophelia Gregory & Dr. Soderholm
It is not clear if Dorian Gray is a hero or a villain. Neither is it clear if Wilde would have disdained that moralistic question...
On Time
Joshua Gawley & Dr. Soderholm
In some fragment, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus says that time is a child playing a game-- time is the child's kingdom. I've always wondered what he meant...
On the Genealogy of Post-Truth
Josie Orr & Dr. Soderholm
It was the autumn of 2016 when ‘Post-Truth’ was named the word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary, provoking the public to become aware of the term and apply it to real-life situations...
The Perilous Magic of Vladimir Nabokov
Grace Clover & Dr. Soderholm
I am often struck by how certain works of fiction create happily-manipulated readers. We live in a time when all forms of manipulation seem to be regarded as nefarious...
Is a Global Ethical System Possible?
Ali-Reza Omidvar & Dr. Soderholm
Is it possible for any country or culture to claim moral high ground or are we now forever swamped by cultural relativism and the idea that there is no master narrative or moral position that is not compromised in some way...
Why and How?
Rose Pettengell & Dr. Soderholm
That last swipe at ‘the Englishman’ seems intended for Jeremy Bentham and his ‘hedonistic calculus,’ which Nietzsche clearly thought was an absurd way to think about both ethics and pleasure...
Monarchy?
Rose Pettengell & Dr. Soderholm
The monarchy is an institution that has been a part of England for hundreds of years; it is ingrained in our culture and only for a brief period of eleven years was England a Republic...
The Village Almost Without Greed
Lily Begg & Dr. Soderholm
I understand that you have read my dialogue with Drishti Rai (“The Village Without Greed”) and I am wondering how your present circumstances contribute to a discussion of what I shall politely called the depredations of capitalism...
Quantum Hamlet
Thomas Newton & Dr. Soderholm
It occurs to me that Hamlet’s real question is not so much ‘To be or not to be’ as ‘To be and not to be’.
If the Sun Breed Maggots in a Living Dialogue
Kyle Blaus-Plissner & Dr. Soderholm
I have always wondered why Shakespeare’s longest and most difficult play has also been his most popular. Apparently, Hamlet is ‘on the boards’ every single night...
The Ouroboros of Hamlet
M.E. Rolle & Dr. Soderholm
I have always wondered why Shakespeare’s longest and most difficult play has also been his most popular. Apparently, Hamlet is ‘on the boards’ every single night...
Free Speech But At What Cost?
Daniel Appiah & Dr. Soderholm
I just heard a lecture by Professor Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, who was roundly criticized by many of her colleagues for publishing an opinion/editorial piece...
Bosola's Voyage
Rose Pettengell & Dr. Soderholm
Why is The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malfi not entitled The Tragedy of Bosola or simply Bosola? He is one of the most insightful characters on stage...
The Gravity of Scientific Language
Cal Hewitt & Dr. Soderholm
Historically, a lot of science was done in dead languages, especially Latin, and it often worked very well...
Is Religion Necessary?
Adam Nell-Millard & Dr. Soderholm
Religious faith surely arose from some innate desire for meaning, formed in an attempt to explain the presence of human life and consciousness...
Does ‘Aesthetics’ Make Any Sense?
Melissa Orr & Dr. Soderholm
In 1914, Clive Bell published a book entitled Art in which he describes his theory of ‘Significant Form’...
Dialogue on Death
Adam Nell-Millard & Dr. Soderholm
Fear of dying is perhaps the most defining feature of the human psyche; humanity is seemingly in equal parts fascinated and terrified by the notion of death...
The Village Without Greed
Drishti Rai & Dr. Soderholm
We have been discussing the problem of greed and the way a certain unregenerate rapacity has been underneath most of human history...