The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. Wallace Stevens’ “Description without Place” was composed for and delivered at the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony at Harvard in 1946. Here are a few lines from this remarkably abstract but in fact… Read More Wallace Stevens: Description without place (1946)
NB: A blurb for a book of philosophical essays asks if ours is the era of ‘faint-hearted’ philosophy, because we were/are not ‘able to bear the greatness, the immensity of the claims made by the human spirit.’ The ongoing ideological assault on the mind and the very soul of humanity point to the widespread failures… Read More Natalia Ginzburg: Our Monstrous Ideas
In the atomic age, the traditional political distinction between “friends” and “enemies” utterly failed, not because we all became “friends” but because the very notion of “enemy” is now meaningless. The only real enemy threatening us is atomic annihilation; the only real totalitarianism is the atomic condition, which transforms the whole planet into a borderless… Read More The Concrete Possibility of Total Nihilism: Günther Anders and the Atomic Bomb
László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his compelling and visionary work that, amid apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the Central European tradition, stretching from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and characterized by absurdity and grotesque excess.The writer recalls how Franz Kafka introduced… Read More László Krasznahorkai, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature: “Human beings remain the same, dangerous to themselves”
Where the postcolonial Left meets the Hindu Right NB: This is an interesting overview, although I cannot agree with some of the author’s arguments. For instance, I think it is true that Hindutva marks an attempt to recast Sanatan Dharma as an Abrahamic-style faith; the main objective being homogeneity and subjugation of an entire population… Read More India’s Conservative Revolution
How are professors hired or fired? It’s based on their knowledge productivity—this is how the idea of the “knowledge worker” and “knowledge economy” emerges. This is the thing that really interests me as a philosopher: that the gold standard, the epistemic norm is expertise; it’s no longer wisdom or something broader that everyone is thought… Read More Can the Humanities Be Saved?
Defying scholarly norms, he took a hands-on approach to research. To study resilience, he visited the Crow Nation; to explore Freudian theory, he became a psychoanalyst. By Michael S. Rosenwald Jonathan Lear, an idiosyncratic and intellectually playful philosopher who melded the ideas of ancient Greek thinkers with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to explore the meaning… Read More Jonathan Lear, Philosopher Who Embraced Freud, Dies at 76
NB: A beautiful and profound meditation on some of the deepest insights of Indian culture. Thank you Professor Mehta. DS Both reached the same uncomfortable truth — the moral exemplar often stands outside the logic of power This year, Gandhi Jayanti and Vijayadashami coincide. Gandhi Jayanti has long been marked by formal pieties, yet it… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The loneliness of Ram and Gandhi
Akbar ने संत दादू-दयाल से 40 दिन क्या बातचीत की थी. Dadu Dayal ने Akbar से मिलने से क्यों मना किया? An insightful discussion with Purushottam Agrawal on his recent book (So Says Jan Gopal), the Bhakti Movement, Akbar, history, and modern-day politics. Aditya Sangwan in conversation with Professor Purushottam Agrawal An excerpt from So… Read More Akbar ने संत दादू-दयाल से 40 दिन क्या बातचीत की थी ? Aditya Sangwan in conversation with Professor Purushottam Agrawal
NB: The reviewer (and Lilla) are too quick in their assessments of Leo Strauss. True he had right-wing followers (incidentally, card-holding Nazi’s such as Heidegger and Carl Schmitt have left-wing acolytes to this day). But Strauss took Heidegger seriously, and that is why he is the most effective and far-reaching critic of historicism, the core… Read More The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016)
After the truth-shower 