The Cartesian Ghost and Gilbert Ryle’s Critique
Many textbooks and dictionaries devoted to the “philosophy of mind” mistakenly regard René Descartes’s contribution to the mind–body problem as foundational or dawn-like. It is as if…
On The Philosophy of Mircea Eliade
Well known in the academic world as a scholar in the History of Religions, it is usually ignored that Mircea Eliade had a strong philosophical formation. Taking…
Heraclitus and the Notion of the Philosopher
If Pythagoras (6th–5th century BC) was the one who inaugurated the use of the term “philosophy” (i.e., “love, friendship for wisdom”), then Heraclitus (6th century BC) was…
Plato, Umberto Eco and the Daimon of Writing
In a lecture delivered in 1996 by Umberto Eco at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, the author of the novel Il Nome del Rosa…
A Christian Scholar: Professor Virgil Nemoianu (1940–2025)
On June 6 of this year, Professor Virgil Nemoianu died. A long-time contributor to Crisis magazine as well as to other Catholic publications, this distinguished Romanian-American intellectual,…
Rethinking Romanticism: Tolkien and Gandalf Against Literary Labels and Analytical Spirit
Recently, Dr. Emily Finley has published on her Substack channel an interesting series of articles dedicated to Romanticism. In the first of these, “What is the Romantic…
Lost in the Labyrinth: a Dialogue with Andrea Colombo on the Ideological Tribulations of Modern Writers
Robert Lazu Kmita: Dear Andrea, first of all, thank you for agreeing to engage in this discussion on topics that are both challenging and important. Over the…
Emil Turdeanu on Byron’s Oscar of Alva: Mythological Analysis and Literary History
Developed especially through the studies of Mircea Eliade and Ioan Petru Culianu,[1] the method of “mythological analysis” is characterized by the tension between two dominant hermeneutical directions. The…
Elements of Platonic theology. The Mystery of the Demiurge
Without prior knowledge of the theology underlying it, Plato’s cosmogony would be incomprehensible. It is precisely this theological foundation that gives meaning to the universe described by…
Mircea Eliade’s Dialectic of the Sacred and Martin Heidegger ’s Metaphysics
Although Mircea Eliade used concepts and notions specific to Western historical and philosophical thinking in his studies and research, he is an author whose intellectual formation owes…
Plato’s Theocentric Cosmogony
Consistent with a Platonic hermeneutic program whose main premises I outlined in a previous essay, I will now present a first application of this unified vision. Specifically,…
The Old Writer and the Sea of Words: Hemingway’s Ultimate Metaphor
Paul Krause’s essay “Hemingway and Me” immediately caught my attention. The reason is simple: I share with the author the same emotional experience – generally negative –…
Philosophy Beyond the Text: Rethinking the Way We Approach Plato’s Dialogues
For most scholars, the texts of Plato’s dialogues constitute the unique and supreme source of his philosophy. Affected by a specific prejudice, which could be called “textual…
Mircea Eliade and the Mythological Significations of the Theatre
In addition to his numerous writings in the field of the history and philosophy of religions, Mircea Eliade’s body of work includes an impressive number of novels,…
The Thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas: More Than Plato and Aristotle
When I first opened Dr. Sebastian Morello’s monograph, The World as God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Angelico Press, 2020), I…