Extended meditations where ideas unfold slowly, critically, and without concession to fashion.
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 …
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 …
Speaking of Marxism, one might think that the political framing of Italian Elite Theory is similar to the method of Power Elite Analysis, developped by New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills, but the fact is that the former predates the later, and has several key differences that make these two almost impossible to combine, given that …
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 …
The metamodern mindset almost seems to operate on Yogi Berra’s quip, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” It structures a worldview that cannot tell you what a woman is (how very postmodern) but sincerely believes it is possible to become one if you are a man (how very modern). That oscillation is …
The Good, therefore, is something that can never be properly known or understood by intellect because it is prior to the very conditions of intelligibility. This understanding of the Good has strong affinities with the apophatic traditions of many religions, and because of this, Platonic texts are often appropriated in this context to forward the …
We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some …
The eternalist–temporalist debate is ill-named. From this terminology, one would assume that the debate is between those who assert that God is eternal and those who assert that he is not. Most temporalists, however, do assert that God is eternal, they merely wish to dispute what this eternity is like. They maintain that God is …
As anyone who has learned to be cosmopolitan will object, the notion of an American scholar is antiquated. A false relic from a mythic past. For Emerson, the question was one brimming with possibility. But no longer for us. This is what those whom society deems wise—the academics, the activists, the thinktank psychiatrists, the intelligence …
Plato’s Republic teaches us that education of the young is not only about the mind; it needs also to be about the body as well. Modern society tends to dismiss much of Plato’s advice on education, asserting that such advice was needed for the world of Greek warring cities, not for large commercial nation-states.
