Recovering Reality: An Interview with Eric Voegelin
In 1973 Eric Voegelin was interviewed by Peter Cangelosi, associate editor of the New Orleans Review, and by John William Corrington, former editor-at-large. The interview originally appeared…
The Fatal Flaws in Positivism
As a consequence [of positivist assumptions], all propositions concerning facts will be promoted to the dignity of science, regardless of their relevance, as long as they result…
Classic Philosophy and the Climate of Opinion
The effort of the Greeks to arrive at an understanding of their humanity has culminated in the Platonic-Aristotelian creation of philosophy as the science of the nature…
Salvation in the Post-Christian Age
The eighteenth-century revolt, enacted in the name of science and reason against the incubus of doctrinaire theology and metaphysics, was certainly an "epoch," and the unfolding of…
Absolute Space and Relativity
The loss of the concrete is substantially a spiritual disease. With the thinning out of faith into a reverential attitude toward symbols, the meaning of the symbols…
Human Dignity and Radical Stupidity
In the series of definitions of democracy I have just given you, I have focused on the question of being human or of not being human. Now…
Three Definitions of Democracy
First, the clichés of the State and of Democracy, clichés that must be removed if we wish to get hold of any kind of political problem at…
Ideology and the Art of Statesmanship: A Conversation
This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at the St. Thomas More Institute in Montreal. The participants include Winston…
Corrupt Communications in a Democracy
Communication between human beings is the modus procedendi through which a society exists. The fact that the "Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy" are in question…
Political Theory and Anglo-Saxon Democracy
The wars and revolutions of the twentieth century bring to its end a period that begins with the consolidation of the Western national states in the fifteenth…
Ontological Reductionism and Pragmatic Speech
[The] sliding down of the substance of order over the ranks of the ontological hierarchy holds as much interest for the historian as it does for the…
Species Problem: An Exposition
Linnaeus' biological theory of the fixity of the species is so superbly suited to serve as the point of departure for our investigations because of its persuasive…
A Letter to Alfred Schütz Concerning Edmund Husserl
Dear Friend, Please accept our heartfelt thanks for those fine evenings which we were able to spend with you and your dear wife. Unfortunately, the time we…
What is Nature?
Any assertion that this or that is, or is not, "right by nature" must remain void of meaning unless we know what nature is. In this matter…
The Homeric Gods, Style, and Blunt Criticism
Dear Elizabeth: 1 Thanks for your kind letter of February 3rd. I hasten to answer it, in order to assuage all sorrows that I would take your…