How not to read Hegel
A major idea in the work of G.W.F. Hegel is best translated as the dialectic of master and slave. In this parable of social existence, the relationship between social superiors and inferiors is...
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Bedtime for Minerva?
Hegel has a famous phrase in the preface of the Philosophy of Right: “Only with the falling dusk does the owl of Minerva start its flight.” (Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden...
View ArticleHow capitalist modernity makes things interchangeable
Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, have some basic things in common: German philosophers writing in German, deeply influenced by Hegel, separated by less than a...
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Bultmann for Buddhists
The world picture of the Buddhist Pali Canon is a mythical world picture. The world is made up of 31 planes of existence, divided into a formless realm, a fine material realm and a sensory realm. In...
View ArticleHistory and the love of literature
Many years ago, as a master’s student in development sociology, I took a course on nationalism with the late Benedict Anderson, renowned for his idea that the nation is an imagined community. The topic...
View ArticleWhy philosophy needs history
After writing my previous post about history and the love of literature, I realized there’s a lot more one could say about the way history can deepen our appreciation of a work of literature – and...
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The people need their opium
Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John...
View ArticleIntroducing Canadian Hegelianism
Hegel wrote about Canada just once, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and what he said comes down to: mostly harmless. His main concern in that passage is the future power of the United...
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Being yourself in the medieval era
Along with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve also lately been rethinking the history of the phenomenon. The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we...
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Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation
The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal...
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