Out Went Horror Vacui: On No Longer Being Afraid of the Nothingness of the Void
That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it…
That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it…
Friedrich Nietzsche’s name is often associated with the term “nihilism.” For many, Nietzsche provides a particularly acute articulation of the nihilistic perspective. For these interpreters, Nietzsche rips…
Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Leo Strauss need no introduction to students of philosophy, especially students of political philosophy. Although these three figures are well-known and well-read, have…
Today’s political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that…
While Dostoevsky was unaware of Nietzsche, Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn, having…
At the beginning of his monumental and still productively controversial work on medieval literature and thought, modestly entitled A Preface to Chaucer, D.W. Robertson Jr. asserts that…
For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching. Christianity for Nietzsche was the greatest…
David A. Eisenberg. Nietzsche and Tocqueville on The Democratization of Humanity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. In today’s political rhetoric, “democracy” is the abracadabra phrase bandied…
Ann Ward. The Socratic Individual: Philosophy, Faith, and Freedom in a Democratic Age. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. What can account for the renewal of interest in…
Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America’s Social Justice Warriors. Mark T. Mitchell. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2020. What in hell is going on in…
Since the Enlightenment, it has been a cliché to portray science as an unquestionable good, and perhaps even as the panacea to all human problems. René Descartes…
Friedrich Nietzsche is a strange mixture of conflicting impulses; so chronically sick that writing was a physical agony for his eyes and his stomach permanently bothered him,…
In a note dating from 1870-71, Nietzsche referred to his own philosophy as “inverting Platonism [umgedrehter Platonismus]: the further away from true being, the more pure, beautiful,…
There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s relationship to Plato is a complicated one. In my book on Nietzsche, I tried to show that this complexity derives from…
Philosophers have a choice between originality and truth. When it comes to the human condition nearly every true thing that can be said about it has probably…