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)
For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love Cathy Mason Being in love is one of the most profound experiences we can have, one that can powerfully move us and irrevocably change the way we see ourselves, one another, and even the… Read More Why love matters most
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
pilgrimage journal the Great Beast From Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: The Great Beast [society, the collective] is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself. It is impossible for me to take myself as an end or, in consequence,… Read More the Great Beast
For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love… she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil Cathy Mason Being in love is one of the most profound experiences… Read More Why love matters most
Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophical Masterpiece James Romm For my money, there is no more captivating view in all Italy than the vast panorama of the harbour of Syracuse, framed by its majestic, honey-coloured Baroque buildings. The city’s origins go back to the eighth… Read More Roots of The Republic
After the truth-shower 