The birth of qualitative individualism
What is remarkable about the ideal of qualitative individualism is that it is so pervasive yet so rarely thought about in depth. To get a bit more of that depth, I would like to examine next the...
View ArticleThe metaphysical prehistory of qualitative individualism
Where does our deeply held ideal of qualitative individualism – that our differences from other individuals are of the highest significance for our living well – come from? We saw last time that it was...
View ArticleKant’s quantitative individualism
In response to my discussion a while ago of the problems between Buddhism and qualitative individualism, Patrick O’Donnell suggested that J. David Velleman’s Self to Self offered a possibility of...
View ArticleHow not to read Hegel
A major idea in the work of G.W.F. Hegel is best translated as the dialectic of master and slave. In this parable of social existence, the relationship between social superiors and inferiors is...
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Bedtime for Minerva?
Hegel has a famous phrase in the preface of the Philosophy of Right: “Only with the falling dusk does the owl of Minerva start its flight.” (Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden...
View ArticleHow capitalist modernity makes things interchangeable
Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have some basic things in common: German philosophers writing in German, deeply influenced by Hegel, separated by less than...
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Bultmann for Buddhists
The world picture of the Buddhist Pali Canon is a mythical world picture. The world is made up of 31 planes of existence, divided into a formless realm, a fine material realm and a sensory realm. In...
View ArticleHistory and the love of literature
Many years ago, as a master’s student in development sociology, I took a course on nationalism with the late Benedict Anderson, renowned for his idea that the nation is an imagined community. The...
View ArticleWhy philosophy needs history
After writing my previous post about history and the love of literature, I realized there’s a lot more one could say about the way history can deepen our appreciation of a work of literature – and...
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The people need their opium
Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John...
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