The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn’t matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is ‘Kill all liars!
The laws of physics, which govern the behaviour of atoms and the movements of the stars, govern also the conduct of rational beings. And yet: Being is still enchanted for us; in a hundred Places it re...
Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.
Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 Bu...
At the same time, there flourished around them an equally remarkable, and for us more interesting, defiance of the Calvinist spirit: the art and culture of the Netherlands, in which man’s relation to...
The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives.
To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contempora...
Throughout the proofs of the , therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.
The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as ‘a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opini...
For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.
The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible...
Spinoza follows Maimonides in rejecting the ordinary meanings which attach to words, and in asking his readers to attend, not to language, but to the ‘ideas’ which he is attempting to convey by means...
A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.
The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend...
Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single w...
Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This
Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aes...
Many social and political changes have swept the world clean of the apprehension of sacred things: the rejection of custom and ceremony; the conversion of marriage into a defeasible contract; the rela...
The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be...
Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our prob...