NB: This is an interesting historical documentary; and the comments are also thought provoking. (I do not agree with everything said here: for instance the suggestion – at about 1 hr 11 m – that Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ was a way of suppressing the horror of Nazism, or that she blamed… Read More ‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Martin Heidegger & Nazism. A Film by Jeffrey Van Davis
Review of Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting Buck-Morss imagines universal history outside of its traditional parochialism. By Nasrin Olla Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or… Read More Year One: A Philosophical Recounting
First posted Friday, March 18, 2016 NB: This is the text of my keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17, 2016. The details of the conference may be read here A pdf file of the address is downloadable here – DS Satyagraha – An answer to modern nihilism… Read More Satyagraha: An answer to modern nihilism
J.J. Charlesworth Capitalism is making us mentally ill because we’ve all accepted its new message – that our freedom can be found in our constant self-realisation, which turns out to be our never- ending self-exploitation. That’s the driving message of Byung-Chul Han’s newly translated extended essay (it’s 130 pages long), but its bleak diagnosis of… Read More Topology of Violence, by Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han is a South Korea-born German philosopher and cultural theorist whose recent books include “The Burnout Society” and “The Disappearance of Rituals.” He recently spoke to Nathan Gardels, Noema’s editor-in-chief. Nathan Gardels: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters… Read More All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
First posted July 26, 2020 Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too.. “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of… Read More Felipe De Brigard: Nostalgia reimagined
by Matthew Rose In the spring of 1941, as Hitler was laying plans for his invasion of the Soviet Union, Leo Strauss gave a lecture at the New School for Social Research as part of a seminar on “Experiences of the Second World War.” The lecture, which was not published until five decades later, marked one… Read More Leo Strauss and the Closed Society
Sara Tor A biographer researching the German philosopher Hegel has uncovered a massive treasure trove of previously undocumented lectures that could change perceptions regarding one of the leading figures of modern western philosophy. More than 4,000 pages of notes on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s lectures were found by Klaus Vieweg in the library of the archdiocese of Munich and… Read More Newly discovered manuscripts may offer fresh understanding of Hegel
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781) An uneasy peace ruled in Jerusalem. Saladin’s victory against the Crusaders had cost the Muslims dearly, both in the loss of troops and in the depletion of the royal treasury. Saladin was resolved to rule with civilized humanity as far as possible. But it was an uneasy peace, with… Read More The Parable of the Three Rings
First posted October 03, 2019 NB: This article appeared today in the Deccan Chronicle, as part of a series commemorating Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary. This is an audio-visual recording of a talk with the same title, given on October 4, 2019, under the auspices of the Raza Foundation. DS The Compass Gandhi’s life-work combined a complex of ideals, concepts and practical… Read More The Compass
After the truth-shower 