The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976. At Rockford University we hosted a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we had a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David […]
“Only a God Can Save Us” documentary Read More »
Via mandatory DEI statements, many universities in the West have been imposing ideological conformity oaths upon their faculty. That urge to control is paralleled in China and in Russia: Russia: It’s the 21st century, and the battle for liberal education is still uphill. (Thanks for Larry Liu for the China excerpt and Alexey Zhavoronkov for
When the expanded edition of Explaining Postmodernism: From Rousseau to Foucault was being published, I re-read several transition figures, i.e., those twentieth-century intellectuals who were important in preparing the groundwork for postmodernism. One is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), whom I first read as an undergraduate. Lévi-Strauss formally studied philosophy and law, but because the bulk
Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and postmodernism Read More »
A fascinating article at Reservatio’s substack on the battles over Kant. While Putin has called Immanuel Kant one of his two favorite philosophers, in this new era of Russian nationalism and the Kaliningrad governor’s recent accusation, the deep question now is whether Immanuel is actually a subversive agent of Western imperialism. Fortunately, “government-loyal Russian philosophers“
The Kant Wars: Putin and the new/old Russia Read More »
At the beginning of a new era, Bacon asks: * What can make science and philosophy productive and generative, not stagnant and sterile as it currently is? * Should we really give tradition much credence? * Learning begins with the senses, but how do we overcome our senses’ and intellects’ native weaknesses? * What is
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” | Francis Bacon |Philosophers, Explained Read More »
A debate from 2014, I believe, between Andrew Bernstein and Dinesh D’Souza, hosted at the University of Texas. Arguments about religion typically fall into three categories: 1. Philosophical arguments about supernaturalism, faith and reason, the source of morality, and so on.2. Scriptural arguments about passages in the religion’s core texts.3. Historical arguments about the record
Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind? Bernstein and D’Souza Read More »
Via Classically Liberal, reprising this intriguing connection. In a letter to his former master, Frederick Douglass explains his decision to escape from slavery: “The morality of the act, I dispose as follows: I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and
Frederick Douglass and Ayn Rand Read More »
In a letter from 1890, Karl Marx’s colleague takes up the widespread anti-Semitism in their movement. My favorite line: “anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture.” (Still true 130+ years later.) Further from Engels: “Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that
Engels chides socialists for their Anti-Semitism Read More »