Rigorous inquiries into philosophy, culture, science, and the structures shaping modern consciousness.
Stepping in the footsteps of Rousseau, the focus on the “inner sentiment,” the awareness and importance of the inner experience, as a guide for our goals steadily increased. With no stable identity embedded in our transcendental, family, and community life, the fragile remains of modern identity have sanctified the inner experience as our highest virtue: …
As in Orwell’s Oceania, or the pages of Fahrenheit 451, the world of The Mirror is a surveillance society where the state strives to control thought. Like Bladerunner, there are huge and ugly megalopolises, androids, and people who might be androids. Like Logan’s Run (film version), there is a mysterious and romanticized threshold that must …
Where some would notice the transformation of live wood into dead lumber as part of what was needed to make the world more pleasant to live in, for furniture and fire, Hoydel saw only death in that lumber; how he saw changed what he saw. His carpentry had been, for him, an endless reminder of …
From the study of highly specific cases of conflict, both past and present, we can establish the facts of what happened as best we can: what were the causes and conditions of each conflict as well as its impact on societies at the time and in the legacy it left (or spoiled) for humanity in …
Following the classical literature, we could say that liberal education differentiates a free man from a slave (passions). The full understanding of the meaning of liberal education can be found, for example, in the literature of Plato (The Laws and The Republic), Aristotle (Politics), and Xenophon (Education of Cyrus), as stated precisely in a passage …
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 …
Ryan Gosling’s role in this new chapter of the sigma mythology is not minor, as he embraces yet another aspect of contemporary male struggle and makes it into a fine performance, showing how male identity struggles for female love and attention and how that natural momentum, at one point used to get the female gaze, …
To know what this means, to know what this feels like, walk into a dark room and, if you’re not stuck in a phase of rolling blackouts as I often am here in South Africa, flick that light switch. Day erupts inside a room, and night is chased into its various corners. The entire environment …
The Socratic method seeks to question conventional wisdom to transcend it and thus arrive at a true understanding. Denying one hypothesis does not necessarily mean its counter-hypothesis is true. In this sense, the Socratic method can lead us to the conclusion that an idea is not true, and in that case, it would make us …
While paling in comparison to the achievement of that final goal and worthless without it, the refinement of a cultured life is nevertheless a worthy pursuit. Ideally, as we see so compellingly illustrated in Newman’s own life, the refinement of culture serves as a kind of superadded halo around the halo of holiness, a fringe …
