Epictetus and how to be free!? Is it a question or an exclamation, a political manifesto or a longing to go native, an aspiration for autonomy or the route to emancipation from bondage? This book presents an ancient Greek philosopher’s take on freedom— freedom construed as living in agreement with nature, owning and ruling oneself, becoming a world citizen, desiring always and only what you are assured of getting— and much more. Epictetus (c. AD...
Bacon
Francis Bacon was a great genius who helped to shape the modern world. But many people would be hard put to say exactly why. He made no new discoveries, developed no technical innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature. His achievement was to offer an eloquent account of a philosophy and a method for doing those things. And in that way he turned out to be as important as people famed for particular discoveries,...
Known to some as Sir Thomas More and to others as Saint Thomas More, the author of 1516’s Utopia—and inventor of the word utopia itself—lived from 1478 to 1535. He was a man of great conviction, deep Catholic faith, and remarkable rhetorical skill. It’s not often possible to trace the origins of an entire literary genre (Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature) back to a single work. Thomas More was, by training, a lawyer and...
John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged: “Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. … You went on crying that your code...
Those who love to regurgitate the word ‘democracy’ are usually those who know little about its meaning in the first place. One could draw a parallel with a criminal on trial who never calls himself a crook. It is only his accusers who call him a crook. De Benoist rightly states that every single political actor today, regardless of which corner of the Earth in which he may dwell, likes to decorate himself with the...
The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment...
Aletheia
Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, typically stands for the correctness of a thought, perception, or assertion, and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiosis, served as a synonym for it. According to Heidegger, this construal of aletheia derives from its more basic meaning as un-hiddenness, where the privative prefix ‘un-’ apes the corresponding privative Greek prefix ‘a-’ in ‘a-letheia’ and ‘letheia’ derives from words for the hidden or forgotten. For...
zoetrope - movie
In common usage, the word “paradox” often refers to statements that may be both true and false i.e. ironic or unexpected. Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One well-known example is Zeno’s arrow paradox, where it appears to show that motion is impossible. Zeno of Elea  (c. 490 – c. 430 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna...
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