After writing the post on what Martin Heidegger can teach us about technology, I realised that some readers might come to the conclusion that everything about technology is ‘bad’ – after all, Heidegger’s conception does strike one as being a …
In Praise of Semantic Warfare
Strictly speaking, individual words and terms have no fixed meaning. Rather, these signs emerge into life as mostly empty vessels that are imbued with ever greater meaning over time by the semantic associations affixed to them by living and breathing …
Forgive but Never Forget: Lessons from the West African Slave Trade
West Africans endured slavery for 400 years, when 15 million human beings were forcibly captured and sold into bondage. During this era, the world’s major secular and sectarian institutions regarded slaves as no better than animals, but modern West Africans look to …
What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Our Technological Moment
Has anyone noticed how prophetically pertinent Leonard Cohen’s Song, ‘The Future’ is for the time in which we live? Here are some of the lyrics:
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It’s lonely here…
If He Was Alive Today, Socrates Would be Banned
A Primer on Socrates …
Socrates is considered the “father of Western philosophy” and one of the most influential human beings who ever lived.
Among other goals, the study of philosophy seeks to pursue the truth and, by so doing, …
Join the Resistance
Should governments know any limits to their power? One thousand years ago, after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the answer became yes. The state could not legally brutalize the population with impunity.
That conviction led to …
Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies?
There’s an elephant in the room, the speaker declared. He was right. I was at a gathering, as I often am, of people who aspire to rescue their countries from descending into woke, collectivist hell. But the attendees were not …
Stop pretending to be thankful
It’s Thanksgiving week in the US and, taking time off from their usual diet of gloom and uneasy foreboding, various American media outlets have been asking readers to list things for which they feel grateful. I don’t know about you, …
Can Thanksgiving Traditions Survive a Four-Year Pause?
For decades, I enjoyed Thanksgiving. Each year, we traveled to my parents’ or one of my brothers’, or in-law’s, houses. Twelve to fifteen people sat around two, age-defined tables and ate a hearty, redolent, mid-afternoon meal of turkey, stuffing, homemade, …
Love Really Can Thwart Tyranny
Long before Freud articulated the conflict, or at best the tension between the enduring psychic – and therefore cultural – forces of Eros (life-drive) and Thanatos (death-drive), the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Empedocles, paved the way for this by positing the …
How Modeling Can Go Terribly Wrong
To theorize about our existence is essential. Indeed it could be argued that to think and speak is, in the most basic sense, to impose abstract models upon the multiple and often confusing manifestations of life around us. Without mental …
Reclaim the Elites’ Frame
One of the reasons corrupt governments love war so much is that it’s an all-access excuse to do the unthinkable. You can direct it abroad or focus it at home. You can fund and staff foreign battles or you can …
How Did Higher Education Become a Cargo Cult?
The “cargo cult” represents an important concept and seems especially so of late. Early observations of such behavior emerged in island cultures exposed to European explorers. Ships unlike anything previously dreamed of arrived full of strange people with wondrous trade …
What is Medical Freedom, Exactly?
The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.
SocratesThe phrase “medical freedom” has become common usage in the wake of the Covid-19 catastrophe. But like many buzzwords and neologisms, “medical freedom” is perhaps ill-defined or even undefined. We …
The Emptiness of the Transhumanist Ideal
Albrecht Durer’s Hare (Feldhase) hangs on a wall in the Albertina museum in Vienna. This picture, or at least prints of it, had meant a lot to me since childhood. I had grown up loving art but lived far from …