Month: February 2021
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Friendly Nothing
Nothingness: Jean-Paul Sartre brought it back into fashion in the post-World War II period with his book L’Être et le Néant. It must be said that reality seemed quite absurd at the time. The idea of a nihilistic humanity, enamored with emptiness to the point of extermination, seemed to be demonstrated by two insanely devastating…
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Kaleidoscopic Perception
The kaleidoscope is a bicentenary invention due to the Scottish optics researcher David Brewster, who in 1816 wrote the first kaleidoscopic treatise, nearly two hundred pages dedicated to the polarisation of light and the ideal number of coloured glass fragments necessary for the best variety of structures: twenty-four! It wasn’t until a few decades later…
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How to Understand Hegel in Just One Paragraph
I would argue that the paragraph below from Hegel’s lessons on the Philosophy of History contains his entire philosophy concentrated in just a few (dense) sentences. § 84 If we consider Spirit in this aspect — regarding its changes not merely as rejuvenescent transitions, i.e., returns to the same form, but rather as manipulations of…