Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.
While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain b...
The seclusion of Spinoza’s life was necessitated by intense labour and intellectual discipline, and his frugality expressed independence of spirit rather than meanness or self-concern. The strength of...
Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To
Now it seems to me that there are bad ways of loving a horse: ways that are bad for the horse, and also bad for the one who loves him. A love that regards the horse as a play-thing, whose purpose is t...
It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.
Individuals in Western states are sovereign over their own households; they enjoy consumer sovereignty through the market and political sovereignty through elections.
From this arises the belief that the order of nature is all that there really is. But to draw that conclusion would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the Lebenswelt is irreducible. We understand a...
Είμαστε πλάσματα που καταδυναστευόμαστε από το σώμα,από τις επιθυμίες μας.Όμως μας πλήττουν και μας πληγώνουν εξωτερικοί παράγοντες και εγκλωβιζόμαστε μέσα στο σύστημα του αιτίου και του αποτελέσματος...
Whose freedom, how exercised, how circumscribed and how defined?
When I put my trust in a critic, this is tantamount to saying that I defer to his judgement, even when I have made no judgement of my own. But my own judgement waits upon experience. It is only when I...
The ‘labour theory of value’, implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man’s nature th...
The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable. For Kant, the virtuous man is so much the master of his passions as scarcely to be p...
Subsequent revolutions have in like manner regarded the Church as Public Enemy number 1, precisely because it creates a realm of value and authority outside the reach of the state. It
Ordinary conservatives – and many, possibly most, people fall into this category – are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist or racist. Just by being the...
In a moment of doubt about the socialist record Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: ‘If the left have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or...
Some of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy result from the attempt to reconcile the belief in human freedom with the eternal laws of God’s nature, and among these achievements Spinoza’s is...
Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.
People who are always in praise and pursuit of the beautiful are an embarrassment, like people who make a constant display of their religious faith.
Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of musi...