In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice
One Cosmos (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
Moving on to #2 on Oldbob's dogmatic list of barking points against Christianity. In addition to making me cringe, this one reminds me of Bacon's wise crack that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." It also reminds me of one of Schopenhauer's central insights, that most men simply stop asking "why"...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Steven Poole enjoys a rigorous examination of an abstract notion Humans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word "justice", one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called "justice" actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract...
Advance Indiana (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Star political columnist Matt Tully, who spent the past few months covering something other than politics, jumps in with one of his classic columns about how to suck up to the insider elites so they will invite me to have lunch and feed me stories so I don't have to do any work that would cause me to break a sweat. The facts that I have shared with the readers of this blog about the Wishard referendum...
Extreme Saving (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time will bring out the autodidact in you as he explores the history of ideas covering the arts and sciences. IOT: Schopenhauer 29 Oct 09 Melvyn Bragg is joined by A.C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway to discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which set the tone for much twentieth century thought
Depth Perception (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that truth passed through three stages. At first it is ridiculed. Secondly, it’s violently opposed. And then finally it is accepted as self-evident. Sometimes, when I write this blog, it occurs to me that I’m reiterating things we already know; truths that we’ve already accepted as immutable. I see that as a good thing, as Julian Pullan...
BBC (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Melvyn Bragg is joined by A.C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway to discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which set the tone for much twentieth century thought
Theo Spark (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
"The thing they forget is that liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once and stop. You do not do that. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them!" - Sergeant Alvin York "The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public...
The Telegraph India (Free subscription) | 10/06/2009
If you were asked to name the leading lights of Western philosophy down the ages, the following will, without doubt, feature prominently: Friedrich Nietzsche, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, John Locke and David Hume. Any listing of great historians, novelists and...
Organizations and Markets (Free subscription) | 10/02/2009
| Peter Klein | Cliff sent me Andrew Pessin’s “Twitter Tour of Western Philosophy.” Samples: “Socrates: Drinking hemlock; toes tingling; legs getting numb. Maybe unexamined life worth living? Guard!” “Plato: Symposium 2nite 7pm, @ The Cave. Open mike, open bar. Under 21 admitted free.” “Schopenhauer: All is empty, pointless. Deep, dark despair. Could...
Ana the Imp (Free subscription) | 09/18/2009
Richard Wagner may have read Schopenhauer but he sure as hell did not understand Schopenhauer! Perhaps apes also read the great pessimist with as little understanding as they bring to Nietzsche?! Anyway, Wagner, by his own account, read The World as Will and Representation several times, impressed by the idea of music as the striving of the will. But he was equally impressed by the notion of the denial...
Berto: Philosophy Monkey (Free subscription) | 09/04/2009
The power of his mind and his inquisitiveness went far beyond what most people are even capable of conceiving. The Greek philosopher Aristotle didn’t simply ask questions, the way regular scientists do, for instance, about how the natural world works and what principles are responsible for its uniformity… he went far beyond this, and consequently investigated the very principles upon...
The Essential Read (Free subscription) | 08/29/2009
Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But the body is his book. - John Donne (1572-1631), English preacher and poet There's the Darwinian's answer--that if our ancestors hadn't been obsessed with sex, we wouldn't be here--which is reductive but incontrovertible. And then, there's the Romantic's answer--which, while ennobling, leaves plenty of room for argument. Rather than denude sex of its mystery and...
Sunday Tribune (Free subscription) | 08/27/2009
Not quite your average beach reads, but definitely a few titles to challenge the grey matter, Penguin's Great Ideas Series 2009 is bound to change your life, if not make you question your miserable existence... presuming, of course, you do exist! Due to be launched this week, the Great Ideas Series 2009 includes 20 pocket-sized books that have been instrumental in changing our world view. "The...
One Cosmos (Free subscription) | 08/26/2009
Continuing with Schuon's discussion of rationalism and its defects, he implicitly addresses Kant's belief that we cannot know the thing-in-itself -- the noumena, O -- only the phenomena, Ø. (In reality, "noumena" should be noumenon , since it cannot be plural, but we will respect Kant's terminology.) Stay with me, folks, because this is important. Kant really represents the turning...
Maddalo (Free subscription) | 08/18/2009
Music provides a little bit of a problem for aesthetics, given that most aesthetics set off either from literature or painting, which are both representative arts. Some thinkers argue music too is mimetic (i.e. it 'represents' something - an event, a concept, a feeling perhaps), but there's clearly a certain difference. Music possesses an immediacy unrivalled by any of the other arts: it strikes you...
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