Dr. Fleming argues that since the birth of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century, a century that gave us “universality, rationality, individualism, objectivity, and abstract idealism,” Western Civilization has developed a flaw in its ethics, moral behavior, and thus in the construction of its state apparatus.

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy.

According to Becker, man is torn between his symbolic, self-conscious awareness and his animal nature. The same creature that names himself, imagines, explores and speculates is in the end, food for insects.

This article is filed under Classics, Death, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Psychology.

“The issue that animated his life and his thought was that of religious intolerance. The Jews who excommunicated him at the tender age of 23 had themselves been victims of a prolonged, horrific exercise in both religious (as well as racial) intolerance. Spinoza uses this history of suffering to reason his way into uncompromising universalism, an outlook that reduces all the contingencies of birth–our religion and race and, by extension, our nationality, gender, sexual orientation–to details of no significance whatsoever in the real process of self-fulfillment.”

This article is filed under Biography, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Religion, Spain.

“This means that we are a people who now live in that shadow world of quasi-existence. What matters to us is not necessarily what is real, but what is possible given the state of things. This is a big change, and constitutes a fundamental shift in the way we understand the world.”

This article is filed under Biography, Mathematics, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Religion, Science.

To sum up in a phrase the true and deepest character of Lawrence’s genius, it was given by his close friend Aldous Huxley in an introduction to the first collected letters shortly after his death: he was a mystical materialist. And thereon hangs the tale I shall unfold.

This article is filed under Literary Themes, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Religion, Writers.

The stifling, frightening conclusion that we appear to be presented with in The Onion Field is that such a dream really is only a dream, that human beings may, in fact, have no inbuilt or inherent moral conscience, and that they can carry out the most self-evidently horrifying of crimes against one another with no checks, no trepidations, and no regrets.

This article is filed under Movies, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, True Crime.