In 1872, at the age of 28, Friedrich Nietzsche announced himself to the world with The Birth of Tragedy, an elegiac account of the alienation of Western culture from its spiritual foundations. According to Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks had once mastered a healthy cultural balance between the ‘Apollonian’ impulse toward rational control and the ‘Dionysian’ desire… Read More Tae-Yeoun Keum: Why philosophy needs myth
A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state. This lesson… Read More The Owl of Minerva and the Spirit of Trust
One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. Like the late Tolstoy, they get into your head. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject… Read More Leon Wieseltier: 'The Wise, Too, Shed Tears'
Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.” The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s… Read More Book review – The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”
The thesis of Macbeth is also the Socratic thesis, set forth especially in the Republic and the Gorgias, that the worst fate that can befall a human soul, far worse than becoming the victim of a tyrant, is to become a tyrant Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two more recent… Read More Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe
“Cultural Marxism” is often invoked by some on the right to explain the rise of “woke” politics in universities, newsrooms, and corporations. According to this well-rehearsed line of criticism, the fixation on race and gender, the erosion of free speech, and the high-pitched frenzy of political correctness and cancellation, are nothing less than a communist… Read More Alexander Stern: What the Frankfurt School has to stay about bureaucratic progressivism
For the philosopher of “hyperobjects”- vast, unknowable things that are bigger than ourselves – the coronavirus is further proof that we live in a dark ecology. In 2013, a philosopher and ecologist named Timothy Morton proposed that humanity had entered a new phase. What had changed was our relationship to the nonhuman. For the first… Read More Book review: Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic
NB: A student of mine, Sai Mukhesh recently sent me these philosophical considerations on science, truth and society. I replied with a few scarce observations (appended beneath his text) because his queries were too vast, and my knowledge too limited, for me to say much. Aside from the reminder that Freudian psycho-analysis must not be… Read More Science, society and related matters: an exchange
Central to our work at the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington is the conviction that we ought to challenge beliefs about children’s limited capacities, and to expand our understanding of the nature of philosophy and who is capable of engaging in it. As one seven-year-old put it: ‘In philosophy, we’re… Read More Jana Mohr Lone: ‘Mommy, why do the days just keep coming?’ – Philosophy with children
Interest in how knowledge is acquired and distributed in social groups has long been a substantive field of inquiry in the social sciences. But with notable exceptions – such as W. E. B. DuBois, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault – twentieth-century philosophers mostly focused on the individual: their central concern was how I know, not… Read More Michael P Lynch: The Value of Truth
After the truth-shower 