“Dionysus is the god of decisive mob action. Once stated, it should be easy to see why such a god is called for and why he is revered. He claims legitimacy” not from his ability to disturb the peace but from his ability to restore the peace he has himself disturbed – thereby justifying, a… Read More Violence, desire and the sacred: Remembering René Girard (1923-2015)
Ibn Sina, known in the West as ‘Avicenna,’ and his contemporary Biruni set out to redefine law, medicine and philosophy in the 11th century The Genius of their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment; By S. Frederick Starr Reviewed by Maxwell Carter I never realized quite how idle and inadequate I was until reading… Read More Central Asia’s Big Thinkers
Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right Daniel Callcut Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact… Read More Wrestling with relativism
By Anthony Grafton Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a… Read More Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy
First posted July 12, 2013 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 1993 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, 1993 Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 1993 Reviewed by Peter Osborne – click for a pdf: Radical Philosophy 070 (Mar/Apr 1995) There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in… Read More Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)
William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality
It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work – from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre Kojève Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many… Read More The scar of identity
To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one’s analytic and argumentative skills, especially in their negative use to expose failures in the distinction-making of others by Alasdair MacIntyre I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian. But I had first encountered… Read More On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century
There are some things that cannot be explained, not because they are unintelligible, but because they are more intelligible than any explanation: Stanley Rosen; Squaring the hermeneutical circle; The Review of Metaphysics Vol 44 # 176 You could not search out the furthest limits of the soul, even if you traversed all of the ways, so… Read More Socrates, the soul and the cosmos
J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer by M.W. Rowe Reviewed by Thomas Nagel Among philosophers of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial… Read More Leader of the Martians
