By Matthew Ehret I have noticed that many pro-Chinese thinkers and writers have lately made the mistake of presuming that Chinese culture and civilization stands in total opposition to the divisive/imperially minded western culture which has laid waste to much of the world over the past centuries. This perception has expressed itself in the various…
Category: Philosophy
The BRICS as an Antidote to the Intellectual Nothingness of Cultural Relativism
The rampant anti-Chinese (and Russian) bias pervasive in today’s society has a lot to do with the fact that people have been conditioned by a very messy world outlook known as “cultural relativism”. While attractive on the surface due to its promotion of “respect and toleration” for other cultures on the one hand and its…
Leibniz: Scientist, Sinophile and Bridge Between East and West
By Matthew Ehret Many people would be surprised to discover that Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), a German polymath and logician best known for his discovery of Calculus, was one of the most important sinophiles of the 17th century, whose writings were instrumental in bringing the idea of Chinese culture and civilization to Europe. Leibniz recognized the value…
Reviving the Memory of Time through Ruins
By Ryan Hamadeh An article I wrote that ponders the significance of Culture. What secrets inhabit this revered term. We use it abundantly in an ill defined way, but up close it reveals secrets which bestow meaning to our most profound perplexion. Countries to have lost their way in bitter war or societies that yearn…
Clarity vs. Obscurity I: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared
By Adam Sedia Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more broadly. The difference is palpable in even the most cursory reading of a classical poem alongside a modernist one. Yet in what does the difference lie? It might be tempting to follow Justice…
Clarity vs. Obscurity V: Eliot’s Masks
By Adam Sedia Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV to this series. T.S. Eliot means many things to many different people. Like Yeats he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the academy he numbers among the titans of twentieth-century poetry, with The Waste Land hailed as the epic of our…
Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and the Fight to Save the Soul of America
To quote Martin Luther King: “Is anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles projects into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real. … Within…
How Huxley’s X Club Derailed a 19th Century System of Win-Win Cooperation (and 150 Years of Science)
In 1865, a group of 12 scientists under the leadership of Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Hooker, and Herbert Spencer (founder of social Darwinism) was created under the name “X Club” with the mandate to reform global British Imperial strategy. At the time of this group’s formation, Lincoln’s north was on the cusp of putting…
Prometheus and Atlantis
By Gerald Therrien In Part 1 of my recently published Trilogy on the School of Athens (The Pre-Socratic Philosophers Explored), we read that, ‘Prometheus therefore, being at a loss to provide any means of salvation for man, stole from Hephaestus and Athena the gift of skill in the arts, together with fire, and bestowed it…
The Discovery of the School of Athens Part 3: The Geometric Proof
By Gerald Therrien Refer here for Part 1 and Part 2 to this series. Now, we must leave the second scene, and move towards the third and last scene in the painting, and look at those persons who are found in the right foreground, at the bottom of the stairs. But, we had seen,…
