On the other hand, if metaphysics is the discipline of reality itself, then the individual’s metaphysical formation will influence his well-being and contribute to weaving the web of metaphysical constructs around him into a focus of authenticity and freedom from the neurotic anxieties of concerted reality. The world will be in free fall, but in …
Water flows; its flow can be used to generate electricity. What can a philosopher’s thoughts generate? A longstanding answer from the classical tradition is that philosophy is an intimate part of the good life, having something to do with generating order in the human soul and in the political community.
Habermas, on the other hand, talks more about procedural popular sovereignty. The difference with Arendt lies in his understanding of autonomy. Whereas Arendt, like Carl Schmitt, identifies political autonomy with a specific public space in which citizens confront each other face to face, for Habermas, Kelsen, and Luhmann autonomy is a characteristic of a specific …
The analysis of myths does not and cannot have the aim of showing how people think. And if by means of the myths we can identify certain archaic or figurative expressions of our own folk language, the same observation is made statement, since we, for our part, are retroactively becoming aware from the outside and …
Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in …
Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new …
Versions of our future are “out there,” a set of determinate options, some objectively better and some objectively worse. We have the freedom to select from among the cards in the deck, but we can do nothing about the deck itself. Nothing about the cards comes from us, only the act of selection. This freedom-as-selection …
For humans, the path to unity with the prime mover was through nous: humans were to follow a single ethical direction with various adjustments made to remain on this path. Virtue was not obedience to abstract rules but following practical wisdom (phronesis) as led by the primer mover’s pull. Phronesis consequently was the motion between the primer mover and humans …
There is something extremely mundane about this foundational element of all culture, but there is also something excitingly cosmic. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien famously explains the concept of “subcreation.” He argues that imaginative authors act like God when they create worlds of beauty, meaning, and story. Extending Tolkien’s concept (beyond what …
Schelling invokes the creation of an aesthetic intuition to link both subjective and objective poles. Our consciousness becomes active and productive by Nature’s own unconscious power to affect us. This is Schelling’s romantic solution of synthesizing the conflict between the subjective and objective.
