Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) was a remarkable man. During his life, he made seminal contributions to a wide variety of fields of study, including mathematics, physics, technology, philosophy, theology, philology, politics, library science, and others. Alongside Sir Isaac Newton, he is credited with the invention of calculus, in addition to statistics and binary …
In The Third Man, community commitment takes on vital importance, being a key pillar of civic virtue that gives the individual the ability to act according to a strict moral compass and in favour of the common good, of which they are both a participant and a recipient. To prioritize universalism over personalism in the …
Claude Lefort and Pierre Manent offer contrasting yet complementary views on “the political form.” Lefort emphasizes the openness and indeterminacy of democracy, arguing that a healthy political form requires constant contestation and pluralism. Manent, by contrast, stresses the importance of stable political structures, particularly the nation-state, as essential for preserving a shared moral order and …
Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but maybe the reality is that though we think concepts like feudalism died, we find ourselves in a new version of it. Our banner lord Amazon calls us up from the fields to push back the invaders – the enemy, Nvidia, is raising the price on processors for the …
Somehow, the Barbour jacket is a symbol of a certain kind of person with a certain kind of personal politics, halfway between aristocratic and bourgeois, traditionally conservative until life forces its wearer to wear it until broken in manual work (and become populist) or to ditch it for a more appropriate dress style in government …
Children, of course, cannot be objects of satire in the usual sense (the neo-classical sense of Pope, Swift, and Dryden say) because they are not worthy targets. The strategy of Blakean satire, though, is not so much to ridicule the ridiculous or to castigate vice as to diagnose forms of ‘bad faith’, to show the …
The point of simulacral terminology is not to clarify but to mystify. Its aim is mythification, not demythologization. The story of Abraham on the verge of murdering his son, on the other hand, is a story of demythologization. Through his experience, the virtual understanding of God is replaced by something more actual and more livable. Something …
