Our Intellectual Desert
“Most thought-provoking for our thought-provoking times is that we are still not thinking.” - Martin Heidegger Intellectually, and not only, we now live in a desert.…
Control Mentality and the Managerial Bureaucracy
“No one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we.” - Samuel Beckett, Endgame Over the past few decades, which is accelerating year by year,…
Personal computer algorithms: Revisiting the Modern Gnosticism thesis (part iii)
Computers are getting better all the time, right! Well, nooo. Not really. At least, not for me, and in more ways than one. Before going further, two…
Depersonalisation in banking and medicine: Revisiting the Modern Gnosticism thesis (part ii)
One of the most, if not the most, pernicious aspects of modern mechanisation, standardisation and centralisation is the loss of the personal dimension of human life, or…
Irrational and stressful algorithms: Revisiting the Modern Gnosticism thesis through liminal incommensurability (part i)
The idea that the modern world, in particular modern knowledge and science, represents a victory of ancient Gnostic views, branded as heresies in the Christian era, is…
Liminality, Disease and Politics Conference
Liminality, Disease and Politics May 20-21, 2021 online conference of the journal International Political Anthropology Conference organising committee: Agnes Horvath, Marius Ion Bentza, Paul O’Connor and…
Call for Papers for the International Political Anthropology
Call for papers for the International Political Anthropology online conference ‘Liminality, disease and politics’, 20-21 May 2021 Keynote Speaker Arpad Szakolczai, Professor Emeritus, UCC, Ireland Conference Description The conference…
The Anabasis of Michel Serres: Hermes-Trickster Knowledge and the Ambivalences of Modern Communication Technology
A Preliminary Remark The background story to this article is not so different from that of my article published on November 1, 2020 in VoegelinView, not told…
Eschatological Politics: The Chosen People of God and their Holy Wars
Hubris must be put out, more than fire -Heraclitus Introduction This paper addresses an issue of considerable contemporary concern, which furthermore seemed all but unthinkable just…
Scapegoating Kant
In the VoegelinView of April 2020 Arpad Szakolczai proclaimed The End of Kantian Universalism in four parts: "It is too early now to draw the balance of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: Fairground Economy, Police States, and the Permanent Apocalyptic Sacrificial Carnival (Part IV)
In the previous articles I repeatedly asserted that we ‘basically’ live inside a police state, as the police is the most basic institution of the modern state,…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Tricks of Economic Theory: Corruption, Creative Destruction, and Existential Corruptness (Part III)
1. Corruption Economic theory, economics and the economy are not only based on generalized, even infinite, limitless exchange, but also on corruption, in the etymological sense of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Tricks of Economic Theory (Part II)
One of the side effects of the current pandemic is the incredibly clean air we all are having everywhere. I almost wrote ‘absurdly’ clean air, though of…
The End of Kantian Universalism: The Current Pandemic Madness (Part I)
It is too early now to draw the balance of the current pandemic madness, but certainly not too early to reflect on what is going on, and…
The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology
The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology. Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai. London: Routledge, 2020. This book is explicitly presented in its preface as a…