Tag: René Descartes

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It is the season of giving, and in that spirit I would like to give a Christmas present to the Christians within our ranks as a gesture of good will. Due to the Brandon economy, I do not have any partridges or pear trees, but I do have two arguments that can be used in defense of our politics by Christian Nationalists: Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and the differentiation between the private and public spheres. And what’s more, they are arguments that can operate entirely within the Christian worldview. (more…)

René Descartes

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I rooted out of my mind all those errors that had formerly crept in . . . — René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

I know this much is true. — Spandau Ballet, “True”

There are famous concepts in Western philosophy, but it is hard to find any better known than René Descartes’ seemingly indubitable pronouncement that “I think, therefore I am.” (more…)

6,502 words

Part 4 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

5. Critique of Magical Idealism (Continued)

(b) How strong is Evola’s case for idealism?

I noted earlier that Evola sums up his idealism using Berkeley’s famous expression esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). (more…)

2,491 slov

English original here

Vyzývám k okamžitému zákazu filmu Gravitace – ukazuje totiž „Zemi“ jako objekt kulovitého tvaru, což je proti Koránu a tím pádem urážka muslimů – dr. Zakir Naik.

Robert R. Reilly: The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
Wilimington, Del: ISI Books, 2010

Vzpomínám si na úsměv, který mi na tváři vykouzlila výše citovaná slova, když se dotyčný film skoro před deseti lety objevil v kinech. (more…)

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Czech version here

I call for an immediate ban on the movie Gravity as it shows “Earth” to be spherical, which is against the Quran, and thus insulting to Muslims. — Dr. Zakir Naik

Robert R. Reilly
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
Wilimington, Del: ISI Books, 2010 (more…)

J. G. Fichte meets Immanuel Kant, 1791

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1. “The circumference of my world is equivalent to the limits of my will.”

In my last essay, we established that for Fichte self-consciousness is an ultimate fact. We saw via our own experiments in introspection that the “I” — this “presence” that says, in effect “I am” — is not simply a feature of the self, it is the self. (more…)

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Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) is a science fiction classic. The setting is a devastated Earth in the far future. The premise is that humanity has been enslaved by artificial intelligences. Human beings spend our lives in what are essentially coffins while mechanical vampires drain our energy. We don’t know it, because we are asleep, dreaming that we are in a radically different world. This is the Matrix. Today we would call it a multiplayer online game.

Like many dystopias, The Matrix is actually too optimistic. The Wachowski brothers thought the human race would have to be forced into the pods. (more…)

J. G. Fichte

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1. Fichte’s Foundationalism

J. G. Fichte holds that the human self has no intrinsic identity, aside from that which we create for it. He completely rejects the notion that our identity is in any way determined by nature. This is the modern “blank slate” theory pushed to a radical extreme. It is to Fichte that we must look if we wish to find the philosophical origins of current intellectual fashions such as “gender fluidity,” “social construction” of race and gender, and radical egalitarian claims about human perfectibility. (more…)

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Host Greg Johnson was joined by learned Counter-Currents writers Stephen Paul Foster, Mark Gullick, James J. O’Meara, and Kathryn S. on the last installment of Counter-Currents Radio to share their lists of five essential books every educated person needs to read — plus, of course, answer YOUR QUESTIONS — and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:05:00 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (more…)

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1. Martin Heidegger Reads Fichte

On June 25, 1929, Heidegger wrote to Karl Jaspers, “At the present moment I am lecturing on Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling for the first time — and once more a new world opens up before me. (more…)

Curt Stoeving, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1894.

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The French philosopher René Descartes was a worried man. His concern was that his memory resembled a sheet of paper that was constantly being written over with his experiences, with facts and events. Realizing that it is in the nature of paper eventually to become filled with writing, he avoided wherever possible being told extraneous facts for fear that insufficient room would remain in his mind for things of importance to this polymath. Thus, he hoped to avoid the fate of Homer. Homer Simpson, that is. (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…)