Tag: Descartes

What Is Wrong with Contemporary Intellectuals?

"Intellectual" and "Disinterested," as we use them, are new words. I "prefer" old words: Scholar, Monk, Contemplative, Lover of Wisdom.

A Tenancy of Will

Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.

The Homeless Modern

The disposition that characterizes the modern mind--a disposition that favors as its ideal a skeptical “view from nowhere,”--serves to undermine the very elements that make community possible.

Vico Contra Powerpoint

"Memory and imagination, as Vico says in the New Science, are closely connected to ingenuity (in Italian, ingegno; in Latin, ingenium) as the power...

Last Call at Descartes’ Bar and Grill

Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and...

When Lawyers Catch the French Disease

 Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped...

Descartes, Algebra, and Alienation

Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution) Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil) Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. ...