Prose

Narrative writings: essays, reviews, polemics, short stories, etc

Meditation on Art
We want to breathe the art of wit when we sit for our meditations. Art, from the Art of Altamira to the the Art of the Deal, is, we don't shun this bold statement, first and foremost a celebration. We imagine anthropological researchers digging up objects with no evident usefulness. What to do with them? ...
Meditation on the sacred
May we think about the sacred without informing ourselves as thoroughly as possible about our species' rich religious traditions? Isn't our meditation predestined to be a desecration, a profanity, no matter what we might arrive at? Philosophical contemplation of the sacred seems to be implicitly critical of the religious authority that decrees what is sacred ...
Meditation on Thinking
We sit and breathe calmly. We observe that we are thinking and in a first, gentle, move, admit that it is a concept that will always evade our definition. We just think. The ability to distinguish it from not-thinking requires a precise definition, hence in other words we are always-already caught in the realm of ...
Evolutionary consolation
[Mommy puts son to bed] Mommy, I'm so afraid. - Why, darling? Do you think I have bad genes? - Why do you think that? Girls don't want to talk with me. - But you got your genes from mommy and daddy. So? - Mommy and daddy talked to each other. Did you? - Yes. ...
I want my words to live in a redeeming, magnificent song to worship the hole in freedom
Advice for people having a conversation -Speak as if you are laughing and thinking at the same time
The task of philosophy
The task of philosophy, often a difficult and painful one, is to extricate and bring to light the hidden categories and models in terms of which human beings think, to reveal what is obscure or contradictory in them, to discern the conflicts between them that prevent the construction of more adequate ways of organising and describing and explaining experience (for all description as well as explanation involves some model in terms of which the describing and explaining ...
Review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall has been a very exciting read for me, and many readers on Goodreads agree (there are 1400 reviews available). It is the best book on geopolitics that I have read so far and it has helped me consolidate what I already knew and taught me a lot of new things as well. ...