On Aldous Huxley’s birthday, it’s worth remembering his warning that the currently fashionable «neurosciences» reduce the mystery of consciousness to the movement of electrons through neural networks. Huxley claimed that such attempts merely conceal a fear of the uncontrollable reality of the nature of the mind. Frightened by the monstrous events of the 20th century, humanity rushed toward the clear and rigid boundaries of positivist scientific reason
Throughout its history, mankind has attempted to reduce all the diversity of life to some established norm once and for all. The problem is that it was the attempts to fit a person into the Procrustean framework of the norm that ended in the darkest follies
The voice of paradox and pure thought. «The Statutes of Thinking», Piatigorsky wrote shortly before his passing in 2009
For the ontological description of reality, Alfred Whitehead created a complex categorical system. In it, reality appears as a set of events that are in the process of becoming and “feeling” events, each of which is located in a continuum of time and self-realizes in conjunction with the Universe
Opportunities for living philosophy I see in the contemporary experimental theatre. In the one that was born from the feat of Antonin Artaud with his “theater of cruelty.” For me, theater is an experimental metaphysics and even a practice, akin to yogic. I think that the theater can become for a modern person what the Eleusinian Mysteries were, say, for the ancient Greek – the bosom of the birth of thought
Deleuze said that desire never comes from within; it cannot be thought by analogy with the essence of the subject, naturally endowed with inner wealth and virtue and striving to express himself outwardly; desire arises from the relation to the external, from the encounter with it and overcoming it; therefore, it is nothing but a way of learning
Guy Debord was a revolutionary of thought and a ruthless critic of all social movements known to mankind. He recognized only one revolution – in the way of thinking and personal destiny. Guy Debord considered all the usual collectivist movements as illusions and manipulations that fascinate people, turning them into puppets of a bright, but meaningless performance
Famous philosopher, culturologist and semioticist Vadim Rudnev – about the era of postmodernism, self-remembering and the place of philosophy in the modern world
Technique is capable of revealing to the limit everything inauthentic in human existence. Technology is immersing modern civilization deeper and deeper into a viscous trance dream-darkness. And thinking itself and the need to think as the core of human nature are almost completely forgotten
September 12 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Stanisław Lem. A person who can reasonably be attributed to polymaths – the range of his interests was huge, as was the variety of genres of books he wrote – from philosophical satire to Borges’ short stories and fundamental philosophical works
One of the forces that are lacking in our country is the autonomy of reason. One of the cornerstones of European civilization. If we are truly making this movement to Europe, we need to take care of these cornerstones. Because if they are not in the foundation, then all this Europeanization of Ukraine will turn out to be fiction
The director with anatomical clarity, step by step, reveals the mechanisms by which love kills everything that does not fit into its expectations, turns a living creature into a kind of zombie. Seeing and understanding this is excruciatingly difficult. It’s easier to turn away and remain trapped in a comforting illusion. True, its price will turn out to be excessive, incompatible with life