by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. This article was originally published at Public Domain Review, under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. After Ignatius Loyola formed the Society of Jesus in 1539, he required that his missionaries send back detailed letters describing their activities and the peoples and places they encountered. In France, over the course of the eighteenth…
Read MoreOf particular importance in the revisionist lesson is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism…
Read MoreThe analytic approach to mental and emotional pathology has never quite shaken loose its origins in improvised postulation and ethereal supposition.
Read MoreExcavated from the Iraqi desert at Tel Asmar in 1933 by a group of archeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute were a dozen votive figurines
Read MoreHow enlightened was the Enlightenment? Not a few critics have seen it as profoundly benighted. For some, it was a seedbed for modern racism and imperialism; the light in the Enlightenment, one recent scholar has suggested, essentially meant “white.”
Read MoreThe most radical thinker of the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), is not exactly a forgotten man, though he has been long overshadowed by his contemporaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Read More“A good writer must write in such a way that one infers from the text what he intended to express. That is not easy.” So declared Erich Auerbach…
Read MoreFor it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded…
Read MoreMayer is “just like / A person with a device” because she doesn’t have one—not a smartphone, not a computer. At seventy-one years old, she writes on a blue Smith-Corona typewriter, tapping at the keys with a single finger.
Read MoreVarious contemporary continental philosophers have taken an interest in espousing some form of a ‘return to religion’ but one devoid of actual, material religious belief and practice.
Read MoreA civil war in Syria has, since it began in 2011, gradually radiated out to implicate nearly ever major global actor.
Read MoreNo matter what the weather, rain or shine, it’s my habit every evening at about five o’clock to take a walk around the Palais Royal.
Read MoreSemyon Ardalyonovitch said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: “Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray.”
Read MoreFrancis Gastrell was very annoyed. He had bought a nice new house only to find hordes of uninvited guests tramping through his garden and helping themselves to sprigs and branches from his mulberry tree.
Read MoreIrving Howe’s criticism is consistently compelling. He is truly a brilliant critic and his writing is pedagogical in a deep sense. Howe writes like a Magid tells a story.
Read MoreThe masterpiece—the war memorial, wall hanging, apologia—tells the same old story, a case of do or die: a tale of friends betrayed, cross-Channel invasion, and the passage of a comet heralding the doom of old England.
Read MoreWe are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.
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