Outlandish Freedom
In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann identifies the inadequacies of thinking of freedom in terms of free will. The narrator describes the paradox of freedom as being only…
In Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann identifies the inadequacies of thinking of freedom in terms of free will. The narrator describes the paradox of freedom as being only…
The line from Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” is quite a challenge to faith. How easy it…
Gnosticism imagines that the disorder and conflicts of earthly existence can be overcome with gnosis – special knowledge; insight and learning. Ruth Gilmore Wilson, a prison abolitionist…
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the putative “Sage of Königsberg,” in a rare moment of lyricism states “Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever increasing admiration…
For the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, freedom is absolutely fundamental. And freedom is connected with subjectivity and Spirit, rather than the objective (measurable) external world. All attempts to…
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) is a Russian religious existential philosopher who devoted much of his writing to the topics of spirit and freedom. Berdyaev recognizes that freedom is…
Analytic philosophy is by the far the dominant tradition in the English-speaking world and many countries in Europe at this point, with a handful of “continental” schools,…
Plato’s allegory of the cave appears in Book VII of Plato’s most famous and longest dialog, The Republic. Plato’s dialogs frequently star Plato’s teacher Socrates as a…
In the Eighteenth Century, self-congratulatory pamphleteers and encyclopédistes, wanting to effectuate a break with tradition, extol their autonomy, and celebrate what they themselves named the Enlightenment, invented…