The world we live in is not that of Plato’s Socrates. It is a world of fragments. The tropic language with which we try to put it back together testifies to our alienation in its very use. Philosophy depends upon the figural use of language. Its most primal gesture is to say, when you say […]
My new translation of and commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws has been recently released (Anthem). I prepared the work upon the consideration that it would be only the third English translation of this seminal work in 275 years. Imagine my surprise, then, very recently to discover that it is actually the fourth. What […]
Wittgenstein studies flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, as philosophers struggled with the interpretation of his two great masterpieces, the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. Many of his eminent pupils such as Georg-Henrik von Wright, Elizabeth Anscombe, Alice Ambrose, and Norman Malcolm wrote invaluable books and essays on his works and […]
The year 1748 witnessed the publication of the landmark Spirit of the Laws by French philosopher Charles Montesquieu. That work bequeathed the separation of powers and checks and balances to the modern world – fundamental concepts that shaped the Constitution of the United States. Spirit of the Laws contained this observation: “Liberty is … not […]
This is a guest post by Michael Peter Bolus, Ph.D. Author of Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative: An Introduction, out on Anthem Press this month. The welcome and entertaining distraction that defines most movie-going experiences has become the default expectation for general audiences. The commercial cinema, as a pop-cultural phenomenon, is rooted in an Escapist tradition […]
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