This essay is being published in six installments. PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS: #1 Introduction #2 Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Types of Nihilism #3 Detachment and Stillness The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment. IV. On Nishitani’s Anti-Nihilism According to Nishitani, we must start with the distinction between an objectifying view of the world and a … [continue reading]

This essay is being published in six installments. PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS: #1 Introduction #2 Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Types of Nihilism The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment. III. Detachment and Stillness What must a new subjective position accomplish in order to resist the cycle of commodification, especially including self-commodification, and the demands of … [continue reading]

This essay is being published in six installments. PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT: #1 Introduction The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment. II. Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Types of Nihilism The postmodern commitment to rejecting any notion of “grand récits,” essentially robbed the western subjectivity from any clear anchoring points in the past. Simultaneously, it removed … [continue reading]

This essay is being published in six installments. The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment. I. Introduction I concluded an earlier essay (Paans, 2020) with an open-ended question: How can one, in a world so thoroughly shattered and torn by “the politics of fragmentation,” carve out a new subjective space? More specifically, is … [continue reading]

The descriptive sub-title of this blog—Against Professional Philosophy—originally created and rolled out in 2013, is “A Co-Authored Anarcho-Philosophical Diary.” Now, nine years later, after more than 300, 000 views of the site, this new series, A Philosopher’s Diary, finally literally instantiates that description by featuring short monthly entries by one or another of the members … [continue reading]

This is the second of two installments, the first of which is HERE. Philosophy in a Newer Key: Outside the Professional Academy and Inside the Real World, #2. II. Philosophy in the Adjectival Key Granting all [that I’ve argued already], then real philosophy outside the professional academy is bound to take on a radically different … [continue reading]

This is the first of two installments. Philosophy in a Newer Key: Outside the Professional Academy and Inside the Real World, #1. 0. Introduction If one feels the need to philosophize, how should one finance it? This is the real question for many postgraduate and PhD students who leave the university without a paid job. … [continue reading]

Where are the System-Builders? Recovering the Lost Art of Connective Thinking I. Introduction: Philosophy and Universal Free Sharing Originally, I intended to submit this short piece to Academia Letters. Its scope and content may be familiar to regular readers of APP, since it deals with the consequences of (hyper)specialization in the sciences and philosophy. However, … [continue reading]

1. Nature is Vitality itself. This Vitality is not the same as the entelekeia of Aristotle, or the entelechy of Hans Driesch. Both of these notions denote a purposive, teleological development. Instead, Vitality is manifestly real as a ceaseless differentiation in the spatiotemporal, physical order of things. Another word for Vitality is Life (with a … [continue reading]