Eight full-bodied minds talk the talk. By STEVE GARDEN.

ASTRA TAYLOR’s Examined Life is a buoyant, life-affirming 90-minutes in the company of a handful of today’s most renowned thinkers – the most conspicuous of which, Slavoj Zizek, was the subject of Taylor’s enthusiastic 2005 profile of the vanguard cultural philosopher, entitled Zizek!. With barely ten minutes to articulate the barely articulable, they wander around various internal and external environments (the locations give an additional subtly ironic emphasis to the ruminations) attempting to clarify the value of philosophic thought. Whether they succeed or not depends on one’s point-of-view, but Taylor deserves credit for never allowing the talk to slip into dry esoteric irrelevance. All of the participants essentially acknowledge the correlation between philosophic thought and social responsibility, particularly when nihilistic self-regard can easily be seen as the subtextual norm in today’s world.

The title is of course derived from Socrates’ famous quote that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but Cornel West reminds us of the courage required to look within. In fact, all of the thinkers in this very fine film testify to the cost of that courage, but in a manner that is affecting and inspirational. The insights come at a ferocious clip, but they never overwhelm the viewer or leave them floundering. Taylor keeps the premise of the film firmly to the fore, that a life examined is one fully lived. One might jokingly muse that a film on philosophical thought might have been more appropriately placed in one of the fiction sections of the programme, but if an edifying hour or so listening to the thoughtful and often entertaining contemplations of personable contemporary philosophers sounds like it could be you, Examined Life will certainly do the trick.