By David Gosselin This is the accompanying article to a lecture given by the same author, as part of the RTF Lecture Series “The Renaissance Principle Across the Ages“. Many today would consider Dante Alighieri a “Dead White European Male” of dubious relevancy. However, Dante is in fact alive and well, as are so many…
Category: Philosophy
Symposium: Renaissance Across the Ages
While all living beings are mortal, only human kind has access to the self-awareness of its own mortality. With this knowledge of our own finiteness, we may become cynical and fearful pessimists wallowing in despair and nihilism or we may choose to embrace a higher set of goals and principles for the identity we shape…
Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic? Part Three
By Gerald Therrien At the end of part 2 of ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’, we came upon the proposition that poets either must be ‘possessed and insane’ and derive their inspiration from some divine influence – like the oracles and prophecies of the priests and priestesses of the gods, or that poets…
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…
Towards An Age of Creative Reason Symposium
To register for upcoming RTF lecture series, please contact info@risingtidefoundation.net Today, perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are experiencing a divide between what is considered to be the “domain” or “confinement” of art as wholly separate from the domain of “politics.” The irony of such a perception is its failure to…
Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic? Part Two
By Gerald Therrien At the end of the article – ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’ – we saw that reason obliged us to ban poetry from our republic, and that reason can admit poetry into our republic, but that it is our job to become the defenders of poetry, to keep it the…
Why the Poetic Principle is Imperative for Statecraft
Cynthia Chung Today, perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are experiencing a divide between what is considered to be the “domain” or “confinement” of art as wholly separate from the domain of “politics.” The irony of such a perception is its failure to recognise that the root of our political system…
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…
The Harmony Between Tianxia and Westphalia
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…
How To Conquer Tyranny and Avoid Tragedy: A Lesson on Defeating Systems of Empire
By Cynthia Chung This is a transcription of a lecture, which can be found here, given as part of the RTF series “Art, Science and Civilization: The Renaissance Principles Across the Ages.“ It is common today to be confronted with the belief that any country, any civilization that gains a certain degree of power, will…
