By Adam Sedia Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is one of his shortest works, but also one of his best known, anthologized to the point of ubiquity. But it deserves every bit of the reputation it has gained. Short, yet powerful and descriptive, it illustrates the sonnet at its best. And it is one of the…
Tag: Philosophy
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…
Why Must Aesthetics Govern A Society Worthy Of Political Freedom? Ask the CIA
By Matthew Ehret In the mid-1990s, a series of exposés featured on the London Independent and elsewhere brought a dark secret to light. Many were startled by the revelation that the entire evolution of 20th century modern art was directed in large measure by the CIA! This not only included the direct financing of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock…
The World Needs a Renaissance, Not an Enlightenment
Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are gravely misunderstood in the popular imagination. The Renaissance was the culmination of a millennium of thwarted attempts to revive not just classical arts, but the classical worldview. The Renaissance achieved this with the added benefit of Christianity, which emphasized the human being as both rational and creative. To…
The Pursuit of Happiness – From Dante and Erasmus to Leibniz and Ben Franklin
This Sunday February 1, 2026, historian Uwe Alschner (author at The Benefit of the Other) presented the Rising Tide Foundation lecture of the week followed by a robust Q and A session with everyone in the live audience. What are the principled ideas that have positively shaped the long arc of human history and liberated…
What is and to what end do we study Universal History?
In 1789, the world was electrified with an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. If this proposition be true, then the entire paradigm of government practiced since ancient times had to be completely transformed from systems of hereditary power enforcing the rule of might makes…
Towards a Culture of Genius
By David Gosselin In the following poem, Friedrich Schiller turns his thought-poetry towards the question of Genius. The question of what constitutes Genius remains even more elusive in our modern age than it was at the time of Schiller’s writing in the 18th century. In his time, the classical wisdom of previous ages had already…
The Mind, Life and Insights of Confucius
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…
Johannes Kepler’s thinking: “Playing, as God the Creator played”
The prevailing view of Kepler’s “archetypal” thinking today contains a fatal error that has been spreading in people’s minds for half a century since an essay by Wolfgang Pauli. The error becomes clear when one realizes that Kepler thought metaphorically, but his critics, such as Pauli, think symbolistically. By Ralf Schauerhammer I actually wanted to…
Poetry, Art and Civilization Today: Reflections on Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”
By David Gosselin July 8, 2023, marked the 201st anniversary of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragic drowning in the Bay of Lerici, Italy, at the age of 31. However, before he died Shelley left the world with one of the most impassioned and timeless defences of poetry ever composed. At a time in which Western…