Image of the letter and a transcription below: Fallowfield, Manor Road, Penn, Buckinghamshire, England. April 28th, 1970 Dear Professor Aron, Many thanks for your letter of April 15th. I can only say that when I read either Adorno or Habermas, I feel as if lunatics were speaking. I have translated some of their German sentences […]
Popper to Aron: letter on Adorno and Habermas Read More »
This week in the A.U. course on Socialism we cover Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx, who devised the ideology of communism, proclaims the inevitable self-destruction of capitalism due to its internal contradictions and urges communists to lead the world to a classless society. The full course: https://www.atlassociety.org/course/socialism. Other Waterfall
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* [Atlas University course] Read More »
Professor Fletcher on Lacan’s anti-humanism: “What you’re doing is like a spider: you’re making a very delicate web without any human reality in it … All this metaphysics is not necessary. The diagram was very interesting, but it doesn’t seem to have any connection with the reality of our actions, with eating, sexual intercourse, and
Lacan’s anti-humanism and Derrida’s intellectual terrorism Read More »
For those interested in Friedrich Nietzsche and his connections to Thomas Mann, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Ayn Rand: Auburn University professor Roderick Long’s course on Nietzsche and Modern Literature is online with a treasure trove of readings, pictures, and musical clips. Related: My table with sources on Nietzsche and Rand: 124 Similarities and Differences.
Professor Long’s course on Nietzsche and Modern Literature Read More »
How different are Stephen Hicks’s and Jordan Peterson’s views on the origins of the Enlightenment? Was Christianity essential or a hindrance?
“A difference with Jordan Peterson on Enlightenment foundations” [Five-minute excerpt] Read More »
John Searle reports this conversation with Michel Foucault about deconstructionist Jacques Derrida: ‘You can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this
Derrida, according to Searle and Foucault Read More »
Following up on two posts on the achievements of modern anatomy (“The Knife Man” and “Anatomy and Philosophy”), here is St. Augustine (354-430) disapproving of the practice: “With a cruel zeal for science, some medical men, who are called anatomists, have dissected the bodies of the dead, and sometimes even of sick persons who have
St. Augustine against anatomy and science Read More »
A bold statement from Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse: “The German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music.” (From Steppenwolf, p. 152, Modern Library ed.) I like the spirit of it, as it fits with my assessment of mainline German philosophy in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Hesse on Germans versus reason Read More »