Mythos

• Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

  In our hyperindividualized age, a lot of us are searching for a storyteller: someone or something to tell us what our lives mean. Compared with the sense of purpose and identity that past generations found in sturdy communities, now “it’s very difficult to tell the story of who you are and what you’re doing,” Dr.

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• After Bacon, Recovering Aristotle

  I realize that a post like the last one, and this one too, are pretty heavy sledding for readers without some background in philosophy, but it's where I think the fight for the future has to take place. Whoever tells the best story wins, but the story–or mythos– has to make sense, and it has

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• Mythos and Utopia

  Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of

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• Why Nobody Cares about the Humanities

  As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities

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• End of History?

  Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a

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• Liberalism + Whatever

  There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful

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• Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien’s Quest Saga

  Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not

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• The Coming Discontinuity

  At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not. —Ezra Klein What makes discontinuity discontinuous

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• Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation

  I wanted to stress in Parts 8 and 9 of this series that philosophy for the ancients, and theology for the early Christians, while it was an exercise in theoria, which in Greek means nous-awakened contemplative seeing, it was not 'theoretical' in our modern sense. It was first a praxis whose objectives were to transform the

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• Genealogy Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism

  The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of

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