Tag: philosophy

My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)

First posted December 10, 2012 From the Socialist Register, 1974 Dear Edward Thompson Why I am not very happy about this public correspondence is because your letter deals as much (at least) with personal attitudes as with ideas. However I have no personal accounts to settle either with Communist ideology or with the year 1956;… Read More My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski’s correspondence with E. P. Thompson (1974)

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Totalitarian Friendship: Carl Schmitt in Contemporary China

First posted October 04, 2020 By Jackson T. Reinhardt For the past several years, the study of German jurist Carl Schmitt has exploded in China. Floria Sapio remarks that Schmitt has enjoyed “enormous currency among mainland Chinese scholars since the 2000s.” Even though Schmitt has received a recent revitalization of interest of his thought among Western scholars, he… Read More Totalitarian Friendship: Carl Schmitt in Contemporary China

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An Illiberal Life

by Blake Smith REVIEW ESSAYNot Thinking Like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss Raymond Geuss, Cambridge philosopher, is a prominent critic of liberalism and neoliberalism, and of the tradition of anglophone analytic political philosophy that he sees as their ideological prop. His scholarship, since the 1970s, can be read as an attempt to model another form of… Read More An Illiberal Life

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National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

First posted June 19, 2014 Martin Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte; Black Notebooks – 1931-1941 – first published March 2014 Reviewed by Richard Wolin In the anti-philosophical arguments of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger views reason, individualism, and democracy through the prism of modern humanity’s utter and wholesale “abandonment by Being.” His obscure point of departure leads to equally obscurantist forms… Read More National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

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Adam Kirsch: Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi

First posted October 10, 2016 Thinkers are supposed to be idealistic, moral defenders of the highest values of civilization; fascists are brutal, barbaric, appealing to humanity’s lowest instincts. Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both. In 1927, he published one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy, Being and Time;… Read More Adam Kirsch: Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi

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What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer

Of Truth, by Francis Bacon     In this essay, as associate professor of philosophy Svetozar Minkov points out, Bacon addresses the question of “whether it is worse to lie to others or to oneself–to possess truth (and lie, when necessary, to others) or to think one possesses the truth but be mistaken and hence unintentionally… Read More What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer

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Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) / The Paradox of the Lie (1939)

First posted September 17, 2017 NB: Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was among 160 non-communist intellectuals and scholars, deported from Russia in 1922 on Lenin’s orders (after interrogation by Felix Dzherjzinsky, of the secret police), for being spies and counter revolutionaries. Berdyaev  had also been convicted of blasphemy for criticising the Russian… Read More Nikolai Berdyaev: The Religion of Communism (1931) / The Paradox of the Lie (1939)

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Against Authenticity

To be human is to be artificial Bo Winegard The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.~Oscar Wilde That we should not lie is generally sound advice, though few of us are able to navigate life without uttering or affirming… Read More Against Authenticity

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Beginnings and Endings

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot धोखा है इक फ़रेब है मंज़िल का हर ख़याल, सच पूछिए तो सारा सफ़र वापसी का है – राजेश रेड्डी NB: Sentences, books… Read More Beginnings and Endings

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