Extended meditations where ideas unfold slowly, critically, and without concession to fashion.
So now we live in an aperspectival panopticon. There is no Benthamian authority watching us. There is no Big Brother. There is just us. Even big tech is just another name for the democratization of totalitarianism. Surveillance isn’t conducted from a lofty central point but from everywhere, through your eyes and mine. We’re alone, each …
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.
Wisdom involves two elements: (i) gaining insight into the way of things, that is, the objective structure of reality or what the Greeks would call the Logos, and (ii) learning to shape our lives in conformity with this objective order.
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.
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 …
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 …
Aristotle does not invent the concept of the politeia, it was a concept commonly used by Greek political thinkers to refer to the form or types of political rule a polis had governing it.
