Printed Word Matters

IS THERE A RELIGIOUS MESSAGE TO KAFKA’S THE CASTLE?

Such an artist as Franz Kafka, for all of the bleakness of his landscape, is a Heideggerian 'shepherd of Being' who by the very resoluteness with which he plunges us into the Dark precipitates us out of our forgetfulness. In some paradoxical way our being deprived of the Transcendent brings us into proximity to its Mystery. This is not to gainsay those who deny the presence in Kafka’s work of any sort of affirmative religiosity. To what extent, after the full stringency of Kafka’s nihilism has b

TO TRANSLATE NELLIGAN

<div>The challenge and reward of formal poetry do not lie in mastery of the formal aspects alone. They certainly are a matter of craftsmanship, but unless they serve a subject, they never amount to artistry. And mastery requires not only achieving the numbers, but achieving them with the appearance of inevitability: without tortured syntax, unnatural diction, and so on...</div>

AUGUSTO DEL NOCE AND TRANSHUMANISM

<div>With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620 'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism...</div>

THE SCIENCE OF ONE: PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM

It’s often said that the first philosopher was Thales of Miletus, born in the 7th century BCE. His big idea was that everything is made of water. In hindsight, this is not such a good idea. Even watermelon is only 92% water. But there’s actually a very profound thought in Thales’ idea. To wit: although the world seems like it’s made of so many different things, of all different colors and shapes and sizes and consistencies, behind this appearance of baffling multiplicity lies a hidden unity. Dee

I WOULD PREFER NOT TO: THE EPITAPH OF HERMAN MELVILLE

<div>In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy...</div>

THE FRUIT OF THE VINE

<div>During the Middle Ages, the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, was a magical place. Known as Al-Andalus in Arabic, it was renowned for its religious tolerance, scientific and philosophical advances, orderly, well-lit cities, and splendid architecture, such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Al Hambra palace. Like its more commercial cousin, California, with which it shares a beneficent Mediterranean climate, the Andalus is remembered as a land of eclectic invention and pluralism...</div>

“VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D” | TEACHING WALT WHITMAN

I once had a conversation in Beijing with a group of Chinese poets who complained about the oppressive weight of writing in a 10,000-year-old literary tradition. They felt the Chinese tradition was hostile, given the great achievements of those 10,000 years, to innovation and new generations of poetry. They were envious of the friendlier, iconoclastic tradition of American poetry, always looking to future writers for innovation and a re-examination of the past. Specifically, we were talking abou

COMPLICITY OR COMPLACENCY? JUDGING JUDGES IN AUTHORITARIAN STATES | By Raymond Wacks

<div>Courts personify the law. In the more grandiloquent accounts of the legal system judges are depicted as its custodians, guardians of its values: sentinels of justice and fair play. They embody fairness, evenhandedness, and impartiality. And an independent judiciary is among the hallmarks of the rule of law. The jurist, Ronald Dworkin, memorably observed that ‘courts are the capitals of law’s empire, and judges are its princes’...</div>

MILTON IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Only a few short decades after the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlan, the rubble of her limestone and adobe bricks which once constituted the foundations of temples to Xitle and Quetzalcoatl repurposed by the conquerors in the erection of their Metropolitan Cathedral, the triumphant Aztec capital of broad, cactus lined boulevards and massive pyramids, intimidating ball courts and sumptuous canals of blue glinting in the hot Mexican sun, was as if a desert mirage, a chimera, an illusion...

STONE CRABS AND KISHKEHS: THE HISTORY OF MIAMI BEACH

Miami Beach, Florida is one of the most well known resort cities in the world. However, during the 20th century this glitzy 'fun-in-the-sun' paradise was also a haven for elderly Jewish immigrants, many of whom had fled from Czarist Russia. It was also home for recent survivors of the Holocaust. They were easy to identify, always dressed in short sleeves, proud to display the numbers branded on their arm - but some wore long sleeves, even on the hottest days of summer, hiding a memory from hell.

ON TRANQUILLITY OF MIND | By Plutarch

<div>It was late before I received your letter, wherein you make it your request that I would write something to you concerning the tranquility of the mind, and of those things in the Timaeus which require a more perspicuous interpretation. ...</div>

WRITING THE SELF | By Michel Foucault

<div>Self-writing clearly appears here in its complementary relation to anchoritism; it offsets the dangers of solitude; it exposes what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of being obliged to write fills the role of companion by inciting human respect and shame. One can thus posit a primary analogy: that which others are to the ascetic in his community the notebook will be to him in his solitude....</div>

RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY, THE RUSSIAN STATE, AND THE RUSSIAN NATION

In the 1996 presidential election campaign, Russian President Boris Yeltsin asked the Russian people to reconstitute themselves as a democratic people with a Western orientation. Since his first election in 2000, current Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked the Russian people to reconsider that identity and to reconstitute themselves once again as a powerful nation with interests distinct from those of the West. He has done this primarily through redefinition of the foundational terms of W

ANIL SETH ON THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

How could any kind of physical processing give rise to any kind of experience, any rich life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. So I like this formulation of the hard problem. It basically presupposes a kind of view of the universe where there is stuff, a kind of materialist starting point, and then asks how and why is consciousness part of that picture? To me, that includes the second version of the way you put it, which is: okay, then how and why is it t

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL WON’T GO AWAY

The Devil has stalked the pages of journalist Randall Sullivan’s and Ed Simon’s books, a whiff of sulfur apparent across the pages of their writing. Both authors have long been concerned with theodicy, with the question of evil; how such misfortune and wickedness is possible in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. Central to that question has been a preoccupation with ultimate evil, the manner in which absolute and metaphysical malignancy has been represented across the Abrahamic

WAR POEMS | Three Poeams by Lucas Carpenter

<div>We moved mostly during the day. They moved at night. So we set our ambushes at night, and they during the day...</div>

THE PIECES | AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WILSON | By Paul Willetts

<div>I must admit that I’m not one of those people who’s obsessed by 1960s music, yet I was immediately captivated by The Pieces, which portrays the brief career and mysterious life of a fictional late 1960s British folk singer...</div>

DOSTOYEVSKY’S SOLUTION TO KANT’S PROBLEM OF EVIL

In Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant posited the existence of a radical evil within the soul and thereby, according to Goethe, 'criminally sullied his philosopher’s cloak with a shameful taint'. He also transformed our whole approach to the problem of evil, whether as an ugly ditch, standing between man and his creator, or the practical problem of surmounting the evil each individual faces in his or her consciousness, in his or her relations with others and his or her world...

THE VILLAGE OF THE WATERWHEELS

The village of the waterwheels, Lao Tzu and a minor epiphany in Moscow all speak of one thing, a glimpse into a future where people are satisfied with less, and yet what is lived is infinitely richer in texture and colour than we often experience today. We will have come full circle from conquering nature, red in tooth and claw, to a return into its heart with more complete knowledge about our purpose here, and the fulness of being a human being. We will be comfortable in our own skin...

HEDGEHOGS, DEATH AND THE BEAUTY IN THE MUNDANE: HOW PHILIP LARKIN CUTS SO DEEP

<div>Fear of mortality, the fragility of relationships, the beauty lurking in the everyday. These are common themes in modern poetry — cliches, even. Yet in the hands of a master poet, they feel vibrant and fresh. Such was the skill of Philip Larkin, a defining poet of the 20th Century. But to truly appreciate that skill, we need to lean close to Larkin’s techniques and process...</div>