Hegel’s World Revolutions; Richard Bourke An absolute will is bound to be an arbitrary one, since it would cease to be absolute if it respected laws and moral imperatives. The mere existence of something other than itself poses a mortal threat to it, and it ends up crushing everything that moves. Hegel sees the revolution… Read More Seeds of What Ought to Be: Hegel’s World Revolutions
Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine Reviewed by Jonathan Rée Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting … political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering… Read More Like a Top Hat
NB: This is the simplest and most brilliant philosophical reflection on time I have heard. Here is Javed Akhtar’s own explanation of it at the Kolkata Literary Festival, 2022; and here is one of his recent recitals, at the Faiz Festival in 2018. It begins around 4.30 minutes into the video. Javed sahib shukriya. DS… Read More Javed Akhtar recites Waqt, his poem on Time
By Dan Bilefsky The Japanese philosopher was the recipient of the $1 Million award for 2022, which is given to thinkers whose ideas have “provided wisdom and self-understanding in a rapidly changing world.”.. Mr. Karatani had promoted a modern form of “reciprocity” he had observed in ancient Ionian culture and that he had sought to apply… Read More Kojin Karatani Wins Berggruen Prize (2022)
Myth taken symbolically is the glass through which we darkly see: Hans Jonas Amar Kanwar: The Peacock’s Graveyard. Reviewed by Aruna D’Souza Marian Goodman Gallery; New York City, through February 24, 2024 Five poetic stories in image and text reveal the ever-present power of nature, greed, friendship, and philosophical inquiry Amar Kanwar: The Peacock’s Graveyard,… Read More The Peacock’s Graveyard
NB: During World War II, Albert Camus joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation; and worked as editor of the underground resistance journal Combat. In 1943, he began writing a series of letters to a hypothetical German friend. In a time when justice and truth seem helpless before ideology and hatred, Camus’ 81 year… Read More Albert Camus: Letters to a German Friend (1943)
First posted August 15, 2013 “Yes, I know all that. I should be modern” – begins Ramanujan’s ‘Conventions of Despair’. Others in India have felt this impulse, and it has pulled them in different directions. In politics, it has drawn them towards nationalism, socialism and fascism. In religion, it has had similarly contradictory effects: either… Read More Nakul Krishna on A. K. Ramanujan: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist / The essay censored by DU’s Academic Council
The homogenic national society is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result of the “social engineering project… Due to its bureaucratic nature, Statism needs the homogenisation of space and time to function. It requires that within its borders, cultures and ways of life are melted into one singular artificial… Read More Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism
From Heidegger’s Nazism to Habermas’s Zionism, the suffering of the ‘Other’ is of little consequence. GAZA casualties live statistics We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century Hamid Dabashi Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon,… Read More Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority
Before me there was no time, after me there will be none With me it is born, with me it will die Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum III, II (1655) the feeble artifice of an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics . . . A word on the title: I am not unaware… Read More J. L. Borges: A New Refutation of Time
After the truth-shower 