Sublime
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Protections against government tyranny do not prevent societies from tyrannizing themselves through the force of public opinion.
Timur Kuran • Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification
Once we have accepted the authority of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its conclusions. To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science is not a taxi cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like. It is, rather, an express train that, once we board it, we must take wherever it may go.
Gary Gutting • What Philosophy Can Do
Pocock argues that while humanists, such as Machiavelli, believed that the citizen fulfilled himself through civic virtue rather than through ecclesiastical sacraments, they were still unable to develop a theory of history, or what Pocock calls historicism.
Prasenjit Duara • The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)
As my discussion of Kant and the modern universalism of Marxism and modernization theory reveals, reasoned analysis also requires a sacralization of the telos – here the utopian goal at the end of history. Faith and sacrifice remain necessary for human salvation. At the same time, the radical transcendence of the scientific human tends to blind us
... See morePrasenjit Duara • The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)
phronesis
Gary Gutting • What Philosophy Can Do
Comme notre lecture de Shils l’a montré, les affaires politiques doivent être traitées selon la raison, et cette raison n’est pas universellement partagée. Ce qui s’en éloigne doit être soigneusement tenu à l’écart du pouvoir. Or ici aussi, le degré de confusion politique des analyses antipopulistes est particulièrement élevé. En condamnant sous le
... See moreAntoine Chollet • L'antipopulisme ou la nouvelle haine de la démocratie (French Edition)
Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.
Helen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Ce glissement n’est pas l’apanage de l’extrême droite : une partie de ceux qui se définissent, en France, comme républicains, passent aisément de la défense de l’universalité des citoyens au refus de l’organisation des minorités, qualifiée de communautarisme, et à la défense de la nation et de ses symboles, comme le drapeau ou l’hymne national.
Samuel Hayat • Démocratie (French Edition)
I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.