Albert Camus has long been misunderstood, but a new translation of his complete notebooks offers a corrective By Matthew Lamb The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus. Translated by Ryan Bloom Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/biographical/ EACH NEW TRANSLATION of a work from a major author should spark a reevaluation of that author’s critical reception and public reputation. Since his death in 1960, a… Read More Fame! A Misunderstanding
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut The Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible – roughly, A Terrible Greening NB: This is an astonishing piece of writing, at once simple and deeply thought-provoking. The style is reminiscent of Borges, and the philosophical citation that comes to mind is this one from… Read More A Terrible Greening
A true believer until the end Vladimir Tismaneanu The celebrated Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and cultural critic Georg Lukács, born in April of 1885, died fifty years ago on June 4, 1971. His first political job, in 1919, was People’s Commissar for Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. His last—in November of 1956, during the… Read More What Remains? Georg Lukács’ Dialectical Wager
AI and the crisis of meaning Alexander Stern “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet… Read More Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse
‘At the core of both our nature, and our way of being within nature, is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true.’ Richard Bernstein Richard J. Bernstein. The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud. New York: Polity Books, 2022 During the past few decades, our practices have been destroying nature,… Read More Alex Betancourt reviews The Vicissitudes of Nature
Isabel Jacobs “Be human, after all!” – “But I don’t want to be human!” Bertolt Brecht, Mahagonny, cited by Kojève Until 2025, the name “Alexandre Kojève” was a paradox. A philosopher often invoked yet rarely read – a famous enigma. For decades, Kojève’s mythical reputation rested on rumors and anecdotes orbiting his Hegel seminar of the 1930s.… Read More A Famous Enigma: On Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography and “The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève”
By Maria Popova Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for writing that… Read More Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World
Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . .… Read More The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
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
After the truth-shower 