Laura Kipnis Agnes Callard doesn’t just admire Socrates, the philosopher forced by his fellow Athenians to drink hemlock in 399 BCE; she wants to be him. Entirely conscious of himself as an icon, Callard writes, Socrates “presented himself as a person one can become.” Following in his path, she styles herself as the sort of… Read More Is Agnes Callard Making You Uncomfortable?
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption Philipp Felsch, translated by Daniel Bowles Reviewed by Morten Høi Jensen In 1935, the Russian-born philosopher Dimitry Gawronsky wondered how it could be that Nietzsche was held to be “the pioneer, the ideological founder of the Third Reich” at the same time that he… Read More Operation Nietzsche
Hegel’s devouring machine Sven-Olov Wallenstein The popular image of Hegel’s philosophical project bequeathed to posterity is almost that of a monstrosity: an all-devouring machine that aspires to achieve total satiety, digesting everything that it encounters by making it into the nutrition of the dialectical animal. Pleroma, fullness, as philosopher Werner Hamacher once suggested, seems to be… Read More The Fullness of Philosophy
Apocalyptic thought in the aftermath of the world wars George Prochnik and Anson Rabinbach In what way does writing about catastrophe, either predictively or retrospectively, risk kindling a new blaze? Conversely, is it possible to identify aspects of such texts that work against the drive to catastrophe? Conventional wisdom suggests that temporal distance from historical… Read More In the Shadow of Catastrophe: An Interview
It’s a conundrum of the philosopher’s biography that most basic human needs were alien to her By Judith Thurman The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to… Read More The Supreme Contradictions of Simone Weil
Ø दिलीप सिमियन ‘’अपने क्षेत्र की विशिष्टता का आग्रह हमारे जीवन का एक अभिशाप है. हम चाहते हैं कि हमारा क्षेत्र फैल कर भारत की सीमा के साथ मिल जाए और अंततः वह इस पृथ्वी की सीमा तक फैल जाए. और ऐसा नहीं हुआ तो यह नष्ट हो जाएगा.“ — महात्मा गांधी, सितंबर 1947 “सत्य कभी… Read More गांधी का समुद्री वर्तुल
In some ways, zero is just like any other number on a number line. But a new study suggests that the mind may treat the symbol for absence differently. Yasemin Saplakoglu Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others,… Read More The Strangeness of Zero
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Klee%2C_Angelus_novus.png?20130120065947 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus Walter Benjamin: Thesis 9 in The Concept of History (1940) My wing is ready to fly / I would rather turn backFor had I stayed mortal time / I would have had little luck Gerhard Scholem, Angelic Greetings There is a painting by Klee called… Read More Walter Benjamin and The Angel of History
Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein fundamentally disagreed about the nature of time and how it can be measured. Who was right? Think of a melody. Each note has its own distinct individuality while blending with the other notes and silences that come before and after. As we listen, past notes linger in the present ones,… Read More Clock time contra lived time
NB: This is the text of the talk I delivered on October 2 at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi. DS The bane of our life is our exclusive provincialism, whereas my province must be co-extensive with the Indian boundary so that ultimately it extends to the boundary of the earth. Else it perishes – Mahatma Gandhi,… Read More The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
After the truth-shower 
