Taken together, the continental and analytic meltdowns indicate that truth is either an evil authoritarian force or that it is nothing at all. That just about does it, doesn’t it? In one way or the other, then, and through the whole century, truth seemed to be in collapse, a scene of puzzlement and despair, a… Read More Crispin Sartwell: Truth is real
What was the name of the female scientist who pioneered the mRNA research behind the success of recent COVID-19 vaccines? Who was that 16th-century catholic nun from whom René Descartes stole the evil demon thought experiment that secured his place in public memory as the father of modern philosophy? I doubt you remember either woman. Their names… Read More Ann-Sophie Barwich: The absent woman
German hostility to the Enlightenment – Let us consider the intellectual contribution to general culture made by the Germans of the first half of this century, and let us take first the German philosophers: they retreated to the first and oldest stage of speculation, for, like the thinkers of dreamy ages, they were content with… Read More Friedrich Nietzsche on German hostility to the Enlightenment (1881) / Zeev Sternhell on the price to be paid for cultural differentialism
With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy, civilization, “culture.” Patriotism today is the assertion of one form of mind against other forms of mind…. it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and… Read More Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds
‘Some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game’ Seventy years after its publication, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism Minima Moralia is a work of exile. Published just over… Read More Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism. By Peter E. Gordon
The appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated… Read More Book review: What is rude?
Consider the elaborate flight stratagem of Western metaphysics, where body-hatred reigned supreme (though not uncontested) for about two millennia. One might have thought that the obvious theoretical position was in the vicinity of Aristotle’s: we are animate bodies, and the soul is the living organization of our matter. And yet what amazing contortions others, and… Read More Martha Nussbaum: On not hating the body
The modern world has been animated by two important impulses. The first is a drive to a mastery over nature, where we can remake and engineer the natural world, this planet and even our bodies, to serve human desire and imagination. Nature, in this view, is not a binding constraint but an obstacle to be… Read More P. B. Mehta: Can 2022 be a year of cooperation?
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves. Albert Camus La crise… Read More Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'
In The Brothers Karamazov one of the monks tells Alyosha that “the science of this world has … analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old.” The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky’s answer to… Read More Professor Hubert Dreyfus: Dostoyevsky on how to Save the Sacred from Science / Leszek Kolakowski: The Revenge of the Sacred in secular culture
