1961 West German Bundespost stamp featuring Kant
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All essays in this series available here
With this, the tenth essay in this series, we have reached a significant milestone. Our journey has taken us from Plato to Kant, and this is the fourth essay on Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the last installment, we saw that Kant is struggling to transcend the representationalist paradigm, but that he is inconsistent in this. (more…)
“Death found an author writing his life. . .” from Edward Hull’s Danse Macabre, 1827.
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It always sounds silly to me when people tell the dead to “rest in peace.”
Practically speaking, don’t you have to disturb their rest to tell them that? It makes about as much sense as nudging someone who’s snoring to say, “Hey — HEY! Wake up and go to sleep.” (more…)
G. W. Leibniz Memorial in Leipzig
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Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here
1. Introduction: Leibniz and the Completion of Metaphysics
Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz (1646–1716) is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of ideas. A true polymath, he was not only a philosopher but a physicist, historian, jurist, diplomat, inventor, and mathematician. (more…)
Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.
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Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.
“Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem?” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1] (more…)
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Introduction
In the previous essay (“Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part One: Platonism”) I began to sketch Heidegger’s argument for the claim that Western metaphysics lays the groundwork for the nihilism and decadence of modernity. I framed this account partly as a critique of the Traditionalists Julius Evola and René Guénon, who aimed to combat modernity with a “Traditionalism” grounded in Western metaphysics (more…)
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Camille Paglia infuriated feminists when she observed in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) that males – as biological beings – are responsible for the development of civilized life and most of the world’s cultural creativity. What no one has wanted to say is that the implicit argument throughout Sexual Personae is that only white males have possessed the Apollonian rationality that “has taken us to the stars.”
Julian Jaynes
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Half of my book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, is about discrediting the multicultural claim that, as late as the mid-1700s, the West was no more advanced than the major civilizations of Asia, or China in particular, and that only a set of fortuitous circumstances gave the West a chance to industrialize first. The West did not “stumble” accidentally into the New World, I argued, and it was not “easy access” to the resources of the Americas, enslavement of blacks, or availability of cheap coal in Britain that made Britain’s takeoff possible.
4,188 words / 26:20
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As I have written about previously for Counter-Currents (as well as in a considerably revised and expanded version of this same essay that was included in North American New Right, vol. 2), the English philosopher, novelist, and compiler of eclectic knowledge of all kinds, Colin Wilson (1932-2013), is one of the most unjustly forgotten writers of our time. (more…)
