I was that old gringo. I was driving south in my own car in Mexican sunshine along the straight sloping road through the thinly populated valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental – the whole craggy spine of Mexico is mountainous. Valleys, spacious and austere, were forested with thousands of single yucca trees, the so-called dragon […]
The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth […]
Visiting Wittgenstein’s home evokes the philosopher’s serious, ascetic mind (no doubt he would disapprove its restoration) Westerners who see ancestor worship as something only other cultures do should look around: signs of its devout practice are everywhere. We have park benches in memory of those who once sat there, plaques to the famous inhabitants of […]
Abreger – La Controverse de Moire Mes deux livres, parus sous les titres de Controverse de Moїre et Horizon de Neith, côtoient plusieurs genres et constituent, dirait-on, un certain essai de réinterprétation, en langue post-moderne, des mythes cosmologiques anciens relatives à la représentation de La Déesse – conceptrice clairvoyante de la projection des mondes; son […]
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s work spans more than seventy years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment. He published more than twenty novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some […]
Les yeux de Néith contemplent, à l’instar du cadran solaire, les révolutions des astres, pour épancher – simultanément avec les instants de silence concentré, dans lesquels se produisent les arrêts de leurs aiguilles bien aiguisées – une nébuleuse liquide d’humeurs toujours nouvellement étoilées, pleines de poussière fluorescente. C’est le passage de l’expression d’une volonté longtemps […]
Bertrand Russell saw the history of civilization as being shaped by an unfortunate oscillation between two opposing evils: tyranny and anarchy, each of which contain the seed of the other. The best course for steering clear of either one, Russell maintained, is liberalism. “The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation,” writes […]
Two centuries before Einstein, Hume recognised that universal time, independent of an observer’s viewpoint, doesn’t exist In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have […]