In 1963 Roland Barthes recommended: “watch who uses signifier and signified, synchrony and diachrony, and you will know whether the structuralist vision is constituted.” When Barthes put that remark into an essay entitled “The Structuralist Activity,” he was at the peak of his career as a structuralist. Yet, as is clear from that suggestion, as...
Few 20th-century writers have moved so dramatically from the left to the right as James Burnham, and fewer still have articulated so clearly the moral and cultural validity of such a shift. Born in Chicago in 1905 and educated at Princeton and Balliol, Burnham began a 26-year career as a teacher and professor of philosophy...
Hillman writes of “the governance of the gods.” It is morenreasonable to assume that both men are attracted to the Buddhistnconcept, according to which there is no self, only a flux ofnsensations cut up into discrete and illusionary consciousnesses.nThis view was shared by philosophers from Heraclitus to Nietzsche,nand it has had decisive influence on devotees...
One of the best things about most of America’s past Presidential elections is that they have really decided so little. A remarkably centrist cultural and social consensus has dictated that, despite all of the vehement campaign rhetoric, both major parties have usually agreed on a wide range of fundamental issues. This national consensus has often...
Most people know nothing about metaphysics and wish to know less. The case is not that they do not actually govern their lives in harmony with a set of metaphysical principles, for that is simply not an option. As Aldous Huxley perceived: “It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given...