Printed Word Matters

THE MODERNITY IN ROUSSEAU’S AUDIAL SELF

Psychology urges that we are never so authentic as when we encounter the self; philosophy counsels that we are never so modern as when we ponder the self. Might one then speak of a perspective that sees the self as both authentic and modern? These two disciplines seem to speak with two distinct voices. And the insistence of early twenty-first century society on specialization seems to encourage the segregation of one from the other. Indeed, we live in a culture that accords status only to the s

THE PARTHENON WARS | AN ICON OF FOUNDED UPON GREED AND DECEIT?

<div>As history’s pendulum swings once again, ominously, towards the political far-right, the iconic, enduring symbols of democracy take on a fresh significance...</div>

FROM FAME TO FOLLY | THE ORIGINS OF (POLITICAL) DEMORALIZATION

Tension between the people and their leaders is a theme in democratic history because it is rooted in human nature. Large groups of people ('The People') can be fickle. Recognition of this condition preoccupied the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to tie government purposes to a protection of 'natural rights' of individual liberty. So, too, did the Framers of the Constitution, who wanted to insulate subsequent generations from the unceasing struggles of 'factions'—struggle

HOW NEW IS THE NEW TESTAMENT?

<div>How is it that the Old Testament (OT) seems to predict the coming of Christ? Was the OT inspired by the God revealed in the New Testament (NT)? Could be, but an answer internal to the Bible itself is persuasive...</div>

WAR POEMS | Three Poeams by Lucas Carpenter

<div>We moved mostly during the day. They moved at night. So we set our ambushes at night, and they during the day...</div>

BACKLIGHT: TECHNOLOGY AGAINST EVIL

<div>Man is locked in his physical and digital cell, blinded by the lights, as the singer sings, with that deep, Kafkaesque, not fully conscious sense of being completely alone in a 'cold and empty city of sin,' with no one around to judge him,' but in fact only alone and judged. Judged not by people like him - that wouldn't solve the problem of evil - but by technology, an increasingly autonomous creature of the human mind...</div>

READING SOLZHENITSYN FOR THE FIRST TIME

<div>I first read The Gulag Archipelago during my first year in Israel, where I eventually settled. I remember feeling that here was something powerful and new...</div>

MILTON IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Only a few short decades after the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlan, the rubble of her limestone and adobe bricks which once constituted the foundations of temples to Xitle and Quetzalcoatl repurposed by the conquerors in the erection of their Metropolitan Cathedral, the triumphant Aztec capital of broad, cactus lined boulevards and massive pyramids, intimidating ball courts and sumptuous canals of blue glinting in the hot Mexican sun, was as if a desert mirage, a chimera, an illusion...

PHARMAKON: CULTURE AND REALITY

<div>Has culture ever been separated from practical life? Culture has different forms: high culture, mass culture, national culture, local culture, family culture, political culture, Christian culture, secular culture, and so on. Culture is the form of practical life. And practical life is the living substance of culture...</div>

IS THERE A RELIGIOUS MESSAGE TO KAFKA’S THE CASTLE?

Such an artist as Franz Kafka, for all of the bleakness of his landscape, is a Heideggerian 'shepherd of Being' who by the very resoluteness with which he plunges us into the Dark precipitates us out of our forgetfulness. In some paradoxical way our being deprived of the Transcendent brings us into proximity to its Mystery. This is not to gainsay those who deny the presence in Kafka’s work of any sort of affirmative religiosity. To what extent, after the full stringency of Kafka’s nihilism has b

NINA BERBEROVA AND SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Nina Berberova was unhappy whenever her Italics Are Mine was called a memoir. She would insist that her book was an autobiography—and not merely insist but do everything in her power to cement this specific genre definition in the reader’s consciousness. The word “autobiography” is in the subtitle of Italics, and the first sentence of the first chapter also says that “this book is not reminiscences” and explains in detail wherein the difference lies between the two genres...

THE WILD GODS OF BARBARA EHRENREICH AND WILLIAM JAMES

<div>Better known for her books on low-wage workers, such as Nickled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her dissertation on cellular immunology, and had always considered herself a scientist, even as she began to write on social issues. Author of about twenty books, the one that breaks the pattern is among her last, Living with a Wild God, in which she writes about an encounter with god, an event for which she was unprepared...</div>

FOR THE POSTHUMOUS GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ NOVEL NOW ON ITS WAY: AN EXPECTATIONS RE-SET

<div>I am called back to the too little acknowledged problem of adult/minor sex in the works of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez...</div>

LIFE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION

<div>Science, philosophy, and culture – are these separate magisteria, or can there be beneficial cross-fertilization? This question may be considered almost as old as civilization itself...</div>

REFLECTIONS ON DEATH AND THE AFTER-DEATH

What happens after we die has always been a major source of religious speculation, and providing answers to this question has also been one of religion’s chief tasks. Many faiths use the fear of death and the lure of an afterlife as a sort of spiritual club to dun adherents into proper moral behavior and correct belief in this world, promising all sorts of things to the worthy righteous after death. Pragmatically speaking, this promotes a very positive outcome, but how does one verify the benefi

THE LAST AND FIRST ROMANTIC

<div>A Secular Age was Taylor’s diagnosis, but in Cosmic Connections he offers a prescription. Across almost six-hundred pages Taylor presents an erudite compendium of arguments and close readings, but many will be familiar with the rather archaic (though by no means inaccurate) form of the philosopher’s claim – that the means of connection, meaning, and transcendence in a disenchanted world must be fundamentally aesthetic, that they must be poetic...</div>

GREY MATTER | THE ECSTATIC TRUTH OF ROMANTIC NEUROSCIENCE

<div>Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books...</div>

AUGUSTO DEL NOCE AND TRANSHUMANISM

<div>With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620 'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism...</div>

I WOULD PREFER NOT TO: THE EPITAPH OF HERMAN MELVILLE

<div>In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy...</div>

THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

<div>During the Middle Ages, the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, was a magical place. Known as Al-Andalus in Arabic, it was renowned for its religious tolerance, scientific and philosophical advances, orderly, well-lit cities, and splendid architecture, such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Al Hambra palace. Like its more commercial cousin, California, with which it shares a beneficent Mediterranean climate, the Andalus is remembered as a land of eclectic invention and pluralism...</div>