"The Remains of War" is an article by
Carolin Emcke a journalist, political theorist and writer.
Since 2007 she has worked as an international reporter for the German weekly "Die Zeit”
Other than her last book, “
Echoes of Violence”; little of Emcke’s work has been translated into English from German. But Emcke, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is a war correspondent for Die Zeit, has begun posting
translations of her articles.
posted by adamvasco
on Mar 13, 2010 -
3 comments
A letter by Rene Descartes, stolen in 1840s, recovered in 2010 by online detective work. The letter was stolen by Guglielmo Libri, inspector general of the libraries of France, who stole thousands of valuable documents and fled to England in 1848. Since 1902 it's been in the collection of Haverford College, its contents unknown to scholars, and nobody there realized that it was an unknown letter. But because they had catalogued it and recently put their catalogue on line, Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos found it "
during a late-night session browsing the Internet". (A Haverford undergraduate thirty years ago had translated it and written a paper on it, in which he recognized that the letter was unknown -- but nobody followed up and the letter had sat in the library since then until it was listed online.) The letter includes some last-minute edits to the Meditations, and some thoughts on God as causa sui.
Haverford, whose president was a philosophy major, is returning the letter to the Institut de France.
posted by LobsterMitten
on Feb 26, 2010 -
21 comments
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s critique of the modern identification of society with the state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. He proposed instead that every human being is a unique personality and participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie proliferating associations of great variety. [...] But what is most relevant to us is his existentialist project. If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, each of us is left feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. How do we bridge the gap between a puny self and a vast, unknowable world? The answer is to scale down the world, to scale up the self or a combination of both, so that a meaningful relationship might be established between the two. Gandhi devoted a large part of his philosophy to building up the personal resources of individuals. Our task is to bring this project up to date. ~ From
The Digital Revolution and me by
John Keith Hart
posted by infini
on Jan 9, 2010 -
15 comments
Since the Goldsmith's Conference of 2007 (which saw the formal embrace of the name), the movement known as
Speculative Realism has, by some accounts, "revivified" philosophy. Led by the young philosophers
Ray Brassier and
Quentin Meillasoux, the movement is becoming known for its two-pronged critique of both the
continental and
analytic philosophical traditions. Speaking crudely, the goal is to fashion a "transcendental materialism" that puts the continental tradition in a better position to engage with the evolving insights of experimental science (particularly cognitive science, biology, and physics), while revising the analytical tradition's tendency to a "scientistic" and "naive" materialism. On the whole the philosophy tries to be less human-centric, acknowledging a world indifferent to human knowing and human being, while still acknowledging the problem of epistemic contingency. Brassier is also a leading proponent or investigator of
nihilism, which will please Big Lebowski fans.
[more inside]
posted by macross city flaneur
on Nov 17, 2009 -
79 comments
Tim Nicholson, a UK former executive, believes he was
fired for his environmental views. He has
sued his former employer for discrimination on grounds of the
Employment Equality act, which states that employees may not be discriminated against for religious or philosophical beliefs. His former employers argue that his views were political, and thus do not fall under the act.
[more inside]
posted by mccarty.tim
on Nov 3, 2009 -
28 comments
We think it’s normal to work all day every day at a dead-end job. It’s normal to fight with our spouses and our children. It’s normal to eat and drink and drug ourselves to escape, to veg out and stare at a screen for hours a day just to dull the pain. It’s normal to hate our lives and be miserable, it’s normal to be lonely, it’s normal to feel hollow. The Freak Revolution Manifesto.
posted by fiercecupcake
on Oct 2, 2009 -
97 comments
Collapse IV , "
Concept Horror." The fourth issue of Urbanomic's "journal of philosophical research and development,"
Collapse, focuses on the relationship between modern philosophy and horror fiction and features essays by and about authors such as
Thomas Ligotti,
China Miéville and
Michael Houellebecq and of course H.P. Lovecraft. Having sold out its print edition, Urbanomic has made the issue available for download as a 200 + page PDF.
Some disturbing images (and ideas) within the download.
posted by Bookhouse
on Sep 17, 2009 -
24 comments
Earlier this month, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of
Edmund Husserl (born April 8, 1859; yesterday marks the anniversary of his death in 1938), the
Husserl Archives in Leuven, Belgium, hosted a
conference (audio files of the keynotes are available: here's
Robert Sokolowski on "Husserl on First Philosophy") in his honor. Husserl's
influence on philosophy is difficult to overstate, and continues to this day: as the founder of
phenomenology, his contributions to
logic, philosophy of
mathematics, psychology, philosophy of
mind, epistemology, existentialism, and
many other
areas of thought, has been
immense.
posted by ornate insect
on Apr 28, 2009 -
15 comments
The
PhilSci Archive is an electronic
archive for preprints in the philosophy of science. The goal of the Archive is to promote communication in the field by the rapid dissemination of new work.
posted by aniola
on Apr 7, 2009 -
4 comments
I both loved and resented that wealth of warmth which Elisabeth brought to me in those unexpected hours of the night. I was usually in the midst of a sound sleep when she got into my bed, and thrilling as I found the ministrations of her fat little fingers, it also meant my being kept awake for hours and hours. Besides, though in my conscious nature I knew nothing about what was going on, I must have had a feeling that my sister was bringing to my life as accomplished facts sensations whose real value to a boy was in their being discovered as part of the experience of growing up. She was presenting me with triumphs I should by right attain only by my own efforts in a much more restricted world… [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Mar 20, 2009 -
11 comments
Explore the
History of the Ancient Greek World from the Neolithic to the Classical Period. Covering important topics, such as
Art and Architecture,
Mythology,
Wars,
Culture and Society, Poetry,
Olympics,
History Periods, Philosophy,
Playwrights, Kings and Rulers of Ancient Greece.
posted by netbros
on Feb 21, 2009 -
3 comments
Sparks of Life. "That the electric 'spark of life' figured prominently in debates over the nature of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is well known. Less well known is the fact that prior to this period, gunpowder was often identified with the substances that were necessary to life, if not as a vitalistic spirit, then as an essential element in the animation of the body. The idea of a spark of life went back to ancient times, likening living beings to the glowing embers of a fire. In the Old Testament, for example, the wise woman of Tekoah begs for the life of her son, pleading 'they will stamp out my last live ember.' But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this vital flame was often equated with gunpowder. There was fire in the blood: not electric, but pyrotechnic fire."
posted by homunculus
on Feb 20, 2009 -
11 comments
The Right to Walk Away Has panarchist thinking finally come of age in 2009? With world leaders of big governments failing to find any new solutions to old problems, should we have the right to walk away from those governments?
posted by stuffedspacedog
on Feb 2, 2009 -
35 comments
Dave Chalmers has just launched
PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the
taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale
on Jan 28, 2009 -
28 comments
"Courage is the ennabling virtue for any philosopher," says
Cornel West in this clip from
The Examined Life, a film by
Astra Taylor.
Peter Singer talks about the morality of consumption and how we should spend our money, as he did in
this NY Times Magazine essay published two years ago today. Given the internecine violence
in the Congo, for example, Singer's 1971 essay,
Famine, Affluence, and Morality is worth a second (or first) look. The film features several other contemporary philosophers, including
Judith Butler,
Kwame Anthony Appiah, and
Slavoj Zizek. Of course, people looking for a more musical version of philosophy, could forgo the film and
just watch this Monty Python bit.
posted by cal71
on Dec 17, 2008 -
11 comments
