Frans Hals, Portrait of René Descartes, 1649-1700.

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1. To Be Is to Be “Set Before”

In the previous installment of this series, we saw Heidegger contrasting modernity to the Middle Ages in the following terms:

For the Middle Ages . . . the being is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal creator-God, who is considered to be the highest cause. (more…)

White students pondering over a Herbert Marcuse lecture on the “one-dimensional mind” of the white race.

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No one knows Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861). He was a legal philosopher of Jewish parentage who converted to Christianity and became a defender of Prussian Lutheran conservatism against the imposition of Enlightenment values. He rejected Hegel’s argument (more…)

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Paul Gottfried, editor
The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2020

The Vanishing Tradition is an anthology edited by Paul Gottfried, and owing to its structure, a proper review is not really possible. Rather, I will individually summarize and comment on each contribution to the anthology. (more…)

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If you’re looking for a film to get you good and spooked for Halloween, you can’t go wrong with Event Horizon, the 1996 sci-fi horror directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. The spooky atmosphere, the gore, the violence, the senselessness of the horror, the simultaneous claustrophobia and agoraphobia of a vast, cavernous spaceship in Neptune’s upper atmosphere all add up to provide a unique experience. But more important to us is the existential meaning of such horrors as the movie has to offer. (more…)