Our Purpose Is Preservation

The principal shift in the transition from German to French theory is the abandonment of any ethical duty to the biggest picture of all, that of society...

Wittgenstein tends to merge certainty and knowledge a little...

It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name...

Korczak lived an extraordinary life through the worst of times. He was an educator and ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto...

Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else...

To say that the apocalypse is both utopian and dystopian is neither left nor right but baldly realist; it is to prolong the ultimate decision into all eternity...

Recalling how Kafka’s tale ends, with the gatekeeper closing the door of the Law as the protagonist expires, roaring in his ear that all along it was meant for him alone...

In reading bits and bobs of Deleuze, I came upon some pages in What is Philosophy? that cooly and accurately describe the artist’s experience...

Today, when I hear that fraudsters such as Robin DiAngelo are seeking to coerce employees of large corporations into joining “racial affinity groups”, my only thought is this: No thanks, lady. I’ve seen that trick before...

What is Socrates getting out of showing people that they don’t know what they take themselves to know?

We must wrestle control from Big Tech. We must restore dignity to the dearly departed...

Just a few steps away, my mind was buzzing like a bee: What the hell are you doing? You’re only fifty! People your age are starting new chapters in their lives, and you’re planning your death?

A practice ‘designed to demonstrate the transience of all material things’ has been co-opted in ‘service of the profit motive’...

It wakes one up to go away from home for a time, no matter where...

These books destined me to an unbalanced life, like a poorly packed U-Haul that leans too far to one side...

I miss many aspects of my chaplaincy training: the deep listening that can blossom in the most unexpected of circumstances, the twinning of action and reflection...

To evaluate states of affairs we use the concepts of good and bad, better and worse. To evaluate actions we use in addition the concepts of right and wrong...

Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades...

The almost subconscious fear that we could be soulless machines manipulated by other powers poses a profound philosophical conundrum pondered since ancient times...

A student of René Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Peter Thiel would go on to report that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration...