Rigorous inquiries into philosophy, culture, science, and the structures shaping modern consciousness.
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.
During the Medieval period in which they were first organized, the universities such as Oxford operated as kingdoms unto themselves, the intellectual work associated with the vita contemplativa occurring in isolation behind cloistered walls that exempted the monkish scholars from the practical exigencies of the town’s daily life.
Meaning, in general, is a process in which resonance is found and created. It has a setup-payoff structure. A perfect image of this is Chekhov’s so-called gun. Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that insists that everything in a story should be necessary.
If the novelist, philosopher and critic, Colin Wilson is remembered at all it is as one of the ‘Angry Young Men,’ and for his first book, ‘The Outsider,’ (1956) ‘the definitive study of alienation, creativity, and the modern mind,’ as it is described on the front cover of the Victor Gollancz paperback that lies on …
How do I know what to read? If I have not read a book before, how do I know whether it will be any good? After all, reading a book, especially if I read it well, is a significant investment of hours. Every time I commit to reading one book, I am simultaneously choosing, by …
Much of Boethius' work The Consolation of Philosophy speaks of luck, or Fortuna. However, as The Consolation of Philosophy continues, the reader is brought to Boethius' inevitable conclusion. That it is self-examination that provides humans with lasting happiness. The Consolation of Philosophy is not necessarily a Christian work or just about suffering but, instead, the power …
The Outsider and The Enemy: Colin Wilson on Wyndham Lewis This paper was presented at the “Filibusters in Birmingham” conference on Wyndham Lewis, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, on 22nd June 2023. In 1956, Colin Wilson published The Outsider, an overnight literary sensation that saw the 24-year-old autodidact hailed as a prodigy and …
Wagner once proposed that it was not enough for music to be merely contemporary or zeitgenössisch, it had to be ahead of itself, summoning from the future forms already lying there in embryo. [1] Two works which achieve exactly this, albeit in the mediums of painting and writing, are Wyndham Lewis’s A Battery Shelled and …
The contemporary debate about what works should and should not be included But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. Western literature's canon is very heated. In the debate, …
