Education Without Authority?

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”

Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and the Importance of the Interior

“The French have become masters in the art of being happy among ‘small things,’ within the space of their own four walls, between chest…

Truthfulness in a post-truth society

“Absolute truth, which would be the same for all men and therefore unrelated, independent of each man’s existence, cannot exist for mortals. For mortals the important…

Understanding Violence and Terror

“For, although we merely know, but do not yet understand, what we are fighting against, we know and understand even less what we are fighting for.”

The Platonism of Hannah Arendt

“[Socrates’] distinction from his fellow citizens is not that he possesses any special truth from which the multitude is excluded, but that he remains always ready to endure…

The Story of Reconciliation

“It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the…

American Politics and The Crystallization of Totalitarian Practices

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the…

The Conditions of “Savages”

Michiel Bot

“The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into…

Thinking Without a Banister

“Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin…

The Ethics of Eichmann’s Defense

If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime — which set forth that so-and-so many…