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The hardest word in Hegel’s notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit appears in the book’s final sentence. It is not a dense new German construction, but the translation of a Hebrew place name. Or, perhaps better, of an Aramaic place name,
Ignorance, Stupidity, or Malice?
A major topic of conversation at the recent Brownstone retreat was whether the people who locked us down and then mandated an experimental gene therapy, along with their supporters and enablers, were motivated primarily by stupidity or malice. I’d like …
The Renaissance of Our Hearts
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
It was one of those days.
Nothing catastrophic happened but it seemed that, …
Plato’s Cave Resurrected
Having lived through more than four years of systematic subjection to gaslighting as well as misinformation by the mainstream media, governments and non-elected, private global companies, those among us who sojourn in the land of the awake and awakened, would …
The Fall of Critical Thinking
The Covid panic and repression did not happen in a vacuum. A pattern of persecuting people rather than engaging those with dissenting opinions had already been well-established in the educational world and the mainstream mass media, making the oppressive treatment …
Theft by Lockdown
Five or so years ago I was clear across the country from my home in eastern Washington State, having flown to Baltimore for a meeting. At the same time one of our daughters and her family lived outside Washington, DC, …
Don’t Slow the Spread of Joy
I like to think of myself as a logician. A rational, critical thinker ready to discard any idea when new information presents itself. Behind the facade though, there was always a passing interest in the arts. Literature in particular, but …
The Taboo Ingredient for Progress: Shame
But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one …
In the Shadow of Oedipus
[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
Sophocles, Oedipus RexMy experience has been that one of the most heart-wrenching things in life is to …
The War Between Knowledge and Stupidity
Bernard Stiegler was, until his premature death, probably the most important philosopher of technology of the present. His work on technology has shown us that, far from being exclusively a danger to human existence, it is a pharmakon – a …
What is Judith Butler afraid of?
Worried about doctors giving fertility-destroying drugs to physically healthy teens? Perturbed by the placing of rapist males alongside female prisoners, or the allowing of any male into a woman’s changing room on his say-so? Annoyed by the sight of hulking …
Roberto Unger: Brazil’s philosopher king
In the depths of the Sixties, Charles de Gaulle, perhaps apocryphally, was quoted as stating that “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be”. This backhanded compliment from the then French president was supposed to illustrate the …
Divided We Fall
The presidential election is still 8 months away. Yet the campaign to preclude a second Trump administration has already reached a fever pitch. In the course of the past two weeks, the public has been treated to “searing” images of …
Health Care: Right, Privilege, or Neither?
Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”
Critically, though, what should be …
The Playmobil Society vs. The Game of Nations
Language, and by extension its emergent feature, narrative, is one of the distinctive characteristics that make us human. Humans are “storytelling animals,” as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall would say; cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer called man an “animal symbolicum” (or “symbolizing …
