Torments of Unclarity

For Nancy, democracy is not a given form of government, with a fixed meaning, but a term whose meaning is in contestation...

Seventeenth-century Christian churches might have been better fortified against the challenges of modernity if they had embraced Spinozism...

This conception of meaning-seeking motivates his modern adaptation of Buddhism, his pluralistic ethics, and his cross-cultural approach...

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know...

All life seems to be like wine, in that one always wants more; but unlike wine, in that one cannot quit it. Writing in particular seems to be a lot like wine. It’s good, it’s bad...

The eternalist understanding of time allows for time travel to be possible...

Marx's favourite colour was red...

Anthropology is fundamentally an anarchist project, as it zeroes in on levels of social reality where the state, even when it exists, is not the most salient factor in accounting for why human beings do what they do...

Twenty years ago a prophetic Onion article reported that the Dinty Moore soup company took a firm stand against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. Today this is no longer satire...

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?