Even if our brains are not up to the task of appreciating all the connections that relate to quality of air, water, nutrients, soils, etc., these things are still vitally important. In other words, we would be tragically foolish to imagine living without insects, plankton, microbes, fish, birds, etc., and the uncountable and unknowable interrelationships between… Read More Certainty
The Oceanic CircleThree things occupied Mahatma Gandhi all his life: God, truth, and Ahimsa. He did not see them in different compartments but as threads in the fabric of life. A life spent in pursuit of truth is a philosophical life. His efforts towards social and political reform do not subtract from his deeply thoughtful… Read More Gandhi’s Oceanic Circle. October 2, 2024
Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation NB: Physical reality is one thing, the ethical domain another. Sometimes the two intersect, as in global warming. But in either case, the ‘framing inquiry’ is about something – otherwise the… Read More Frameworks
Hello, we are pleased to invite you to join us for a conversation with Dilip Simeon in Chandigarh on Saturday, August 3; 2024. More details here: https://pagdandi.substack.com/p/jaag-musafir Kindly RSVP if you plan to come: https://forms.gle/P7vAeWmWHWic7pgi6 My regards and gratitude to Pagdandi Collective for organising this conversation. What follows below is my personal addition to the matter above,… Read More Jaag Musafir: Pagdandi Collective
I was searching for meaning and purpose so I became an academic philosopher. Reader, you might guess what happened next Pranay Sanklecha Why did you decide to study philosophy?’ asked the Harvard professor, sitting in the park in his cream linen suit. ‘Because I want to find out how to live,’ I said. ‘I want… Read More Philosophy was once alive
First posted October 06, 2012 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford University Press; 2,355 pages WHEN Thomas Hobbes was maths tutor to the future English king, Charles II, in Paris in 1646, his young charge reportedly found Britain’s first great modern philosopher to be “the oddest fellow he ever met with”. That was one of… Read More After more than 350 years, the first critical edition of Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’
First posted February 28, 2014 In Culture and the Death of God he deploys all his formidable skills to explain how the high hopes of many generations of secular materialists collapsed along with the twin towers. Culture and the Death of God – Terry Eagletonreviewed by Jonathan Rée Atheism is in trouble, according to Terry Eagleton. Throughout the 20th century it… Read More Culture and the Death of God: Terry Eagleton
Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister Peter Salmon I have a terrible fear that I shall one day be pronounced holy: from Ecce Homo; by Friedrich Nietzsche On the morning of 24 September 1938, a Franciscan priest by the name of Herman Van Breda… Read More Paper trails
In Aeschylus’ ‘Persians’, Xerxes though defeated, was not dethroned. He went on to rule for another decade or more. But the spirit of freedom and democracy set alight by that struggle lived on for more than a century Vijay Tankha What could the earliest extant Greek tragedy have to say about the recent elections? Nothing… Read More Why an ancient Greek tragedy has resonance in politics today — in India and beyond
Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s film Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (2020) takes viewers on an extraordinary journey to discover how shooting stars, meteorites, and deep space impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and our future. In Clive’s words (responding to Brother Guy Consolmagno of the… Read More ‘Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds’
After the truth-shower 