Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explain this extraordinary historical moment – through the crises that constitute the malaise of modernity and the root cause of this malaise – modernity’s flight from the ascetic norms. But although worthy, this historical method cannot explain why history appears to be hastening. To explain this,…
Abstract: This article explores Arnold Berleant’s environmental aesthetics with a focus on his innovative use of music as a model for aesthetic experience. Berleant challenges the dominant Kantian framework of disinterested contemplation by proposing an aesthetics of engagement – an immersive, participatory, and multisensory approach rooted in the everyday. Music, in Berleant’s theory, does not exist as a fixed…
Abstract: This article is a critique of the research perspective that analyzes political myths based on the methods of the study of myths. The author points to the need to supplement this perspective with the Lacanian theory of fantasy, which allows for capture of subjective desire manifested in myths. Theories in the study of myths (of…
Abstract: Military history has to date shown little interest in war periodicity. It will soon witness the confirmation or disproof of a war forecast made over thirty years ago, by a socio-political model of Anglo-American culture that predicted a major civic and war crisis for the 2020s. Extending that model beyond the scope of original authors, Neil…
Abstract: In a critical commentary on the final paragraph of The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, ¶1067 (1885)) it is argued that Nietzsche ironically presupposes the metaphysics, and even the theology, he putatively eschews and repudiates. Nietzsche’s anti-realism about aesthetics, in its broadest extension, is refuted by showing that the Apollonian is not an illusion but a fundamental…
Abstract: In this paper, the author reflects on the concept of second-person perspective in Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, with a special emphasis on his ethics of compassion and moral psychology. By referring to some of the pioneers who introduced the concept of second-person perspective into philosophy, the author first tries to define the terms: second-person perspective and second-person relatedness….
Abstract: This paper defends that gastronomy is a medium for artistic expression. It explores two arguments frequently used to defend that gastronomy is not an artistic medium: the problem of consumption and the asymmetry between aesthetic judgments and judgments of personal preference. The former defends that gastronomy and fine arts are fundamentally…
Abstract: The idea of human nature can be wielded to justify exploitation and domination, but drawing on the work of Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin and others, I argue consideration of our embodied nature can help humans thrive. The anarchist tradition encompasses people’s tendency to reject unnecessary authority, and it invokes the sociality inseparable from human…
Abstract: This essay explicates the position of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on the problem of drugs. At the focus of my analysis are the passages in “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment” which interpret the Homeric myth of the Lotus-eaters in terms of the modern phenomenon of substance abuse. Since the Dialectic reads…
Abstract: The article discusses satisfaction with self-presentation as the way of functioning (modus vivendi) of a magnanimous man in relation to Aristotelian ethics. Even though self-presentation is usually considered as a kind of biologically determined instinct, it may be argued that self-presentation is also an aspect of the actions of a magnanimous man. Naturalist social theories concerning moral…