We like to believe we are Lockean, but we suspect we are Machiavellian or on our best days Ciceronian, and we are ever-insecurely deluded about having evaded Hegel and Rousseau.
#Philosophy of World History
Thesis of Theses (re Samuel Goldman on The Religious Origins of Liberalism)
Posted in History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: American Conservative, Conservatism, Hegel, Liberalism, Locke, Philosophy of World History, Political Theology
after the DNC
Perhaps we’ll be able one day soon to discuss why the philosophy of history holds that every civilization gets only one idea, and what that means for Americans and the American idea, never just the last best hope but also the absolute danger, impossible to be one without also being/becoming the other…
Posted in Politics Tagged with: American Idea, communitarianism, individualism, Obama, Philosophy of World History
Notes on the Invention of the World
The plural-realist or perspectivist thought (or anti-thought) can never be understood as generally valid except by reference to a standard that would govern the truth and consistency of all such assertions. This problem has always stood in the way of taking the “post-modernist insight” seriously: If it means what it is meant to mean, then it is at best provisional, and otherwise meaningless.
Posted in Featured, History, Neo-Imperialism, Philosophy Tagged with: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Empiricism, GWF Hegel, Jena, Philosophy of World History, Post-Modernism
to blog or not to blog or to notblog-blog
…am not much moved by current events… almost everything I’ve written over the last few weeks has had no particular peg to “what’s happening in the world” beyond the fact that it happened to be what I happened to be…
Posted in Meta, Miscellany, Philosophy Tagged with: American Idea, Hegel, Philosophy of World History, Theory of the Internet, WikiLeaks