Vernon, Mark. "Plato's Dialogues, Part 6: The Philosophical School." GUARDIAN September 7, 2009.

What would it have been like to attend the Academy, Plato's ancient school? You didn't have to pay, though you did have to have wealth to afford the leisure. A pupil of Aristotle, Dicearchus, stressed that Plato's academicians were treated as free and equal. Women were not only allowed to take part, but two women were remembered in antiquity by name, Axiothea and Lastheneia. They all wore simple cloaks. One lecture that was delivered by Plato was on "The Good". We know about it because whilst the audience arrived thinking they might learn something about the good life, they were actually subjected to a celebration of mathematics. They should have known better: "Let no one unskilled in geometry enter," was purportedly written over the entrance. Plato would have put geometry at the top of Philosophy 101. There is a parody of life in the Academy written by the comic playwright Epicrates. He mocks the activities of the students, picturing them discussing the nature of a pumpkin: "Well now, first of all they took up their places, and with heads bowed they reflected for a long time. Then suddenly, whilst they were still bent low in study, one of the lads said it was a round vegetable, another that it was a grass, another that it was a tree." What is striking about this "account" is that the academic way of life provided grounds for mirth at all: it must have struck ancient Greeks as decidedly odd, and novel, for groups of people to gather together to contemplate, discuss and study. Education is a crucial concern here, and Plato believed it was the foundation of any healthy politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/07/plato-dialogues-philosophy.

Thomas, Louisa. "Their Love is Alive." NEWSWEEK September 4, 2009.

It began as a game to pass the time while the rain fell and lightning struck. Visiting Switzerland in June 1816, a small group—young and rivalrous, amorous and ever so literary—agreed to a ghost-story-writing contest. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, just 18, could come up with nothing at first. Then she had a nightmare—a walking corpse, glimmering yellow eyes. It delighted her. The next day, she announced to the others that she had imagined a story. Frankenstein was born. Two years later Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was published anonymously. Readers immediately wondered about the author's identity. Some guessed it was the poet Percy Shelley, who had written the novel's preface. Those who knew that the author was Percy's (by then) wife, Mary Shelley, were amazed. Mary later said that she was constantly asked how she, "then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?" In an introduction to a revised 1831 edition, she told the Gothic tale of the ghost-story contest. (Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire, were the others present.) As for Percy, she "certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling" in the book, but she did depend upon his encouragement and more. "Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone." The question of whether Mary alone wrote the novel, however, would not die. . . .

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/03/their-love-is-alive.html

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES September 7, 2009.

I write a third column on the teaching of writing in colleges and universities because three important questions posed by a large number of posters remain unanswered: (1) Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier? (2) Isn’t extensive reading the key to learning how to write? (3) What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like? Questions (1) and (2) can be answered briefly. Question (3) is, as they say, a work in progress. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/.

Beam, Alex. "Making History. Or Not." BOSTON GLOBE September 8, 2009.

Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, eds. New Literary History of America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Linda Lovelace and James Fenimore Cooper. Together at last. Welcome to Harvard’s wacky New Literary History of America, arriving in bookstores as we speak. “Deep Throat,’’ “Roll Over, Beethoven,’’ the election of Barack Obama - it’s all literature now. What exactly is this wildly uneven, 1,100-page doorstop retailing for a mere $49.95? It’s certainly not a textbook, not unless you are teaching Andrew Jackson’s bank veto, the story of the Winchester rifle, Hurricane Katrina, and “the startling poetry of Juan Felipe Herrera’’ in the same course. The Harvard University Press calls it a reference work, but Publishers Weekly churlishly noted that “Sylvia Plath barely gets a nod as does James Merrill.’’ . . . Read the rest here: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/09/08/making_history_or_not/.

"The Social Construction of the Self," Alghero, Italy, September 28-29, 2009.

What are the connections between social cognition and individual selfhood? How do social relationships contribute to shape our inner self? Conversely, how much of our mental like is intrinsically "social", and in what sense? Is there a sharp boundary between self and other, or these categories require a more nuanced analysis? If there is an intimate connection between society and selfhood, what is the role of language in this respect? These are some of the issues to be addressed in this interdisciplinary conference, where leading scholars in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience are gathered to discuss the extent by which our inner mental life is influenced by the social context we live in. Programme: Monday 28 September 2009 09:00: Opening remarks 09:15: Cecilia Heyes (Oxford), The role of learning in the development of mirror neurons 10:15: Coffee break 10:45: Corrado Sinigaglia (Milan), Motor cognition and action understanding 11:45: Peter Hobson & Jessica Hobson (London), Self/other distinction from the perspective of autism 13:00: Lunch 14:30: Matteo Mameli (London), An evolutionary perspective on social cognition 15:30: Shaun Gallagher (Orlando/Hatfield), Social interaction in the phenomenology of agency 16:30: Coffee break 17:00: Cristiano Castelfranchi & Fabio Paglieri (Rome), Self-control as a social problem 18:00: Gregory Currie (Nottingham), Language, narrative and the spread of reputation 20:30: Social dinner Tuesday 29 September 2009 09:00: Barry Smith (London), Language, self-knowledge and consciousness 10:00: Julian Kiverstein (Edinburgh), Where am I? The extended mind and sociality 11:00: Coffee break 11:30: Till Vierkant (Edinburgh), The extended will: social and natural artefacts for self-control 12:30: Concluding remarks　 Organisers: F. Bacchini (Università di Sassari), C. Castelfranchi (ISTC-CNR Roma), F. Paglieri (ISTC-CNR Roma) The event is organized by the research project CONTACT - Consciousness inInteraction: the Role of the Natural and Social Environment in Shaping Consciousness (http://linus.media.unisi.it/cirg/contact/), which is part of the ESF-EuroCORES programme CNCC - Consciousness in Interaction (http://www.esf.org/cncc). The event is also sponsored by:Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione - Università degli Studi di Siena Facoltà di Architettura, Alghero - Università degli Studi di Sassari Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR, Roma. Conference poster: http://www.media.unisi.it/cirg/fp/conf_social_self.pdf.

Book Series: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press).

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal. Further information may be found here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=308682.

"Sartre on Ethics and Existentialism," Institute of Philosophy, University of London, September 17, 2009.

Programme: 10.00 Registration & coffee 10.30 Christine Daigle (Brock) "The Ethics of Authenticity" 11.45 Azzedine Haddour (UCL), "Being Colonized" 1.00 Lunch (own arrangements) 2.30 Andrew Leak (UCL) "The Literary and the Philosophical" 3.45 Tea 4.15 Jonathan Webber (Cardiff) "Bad Faith and the Other" 5.30 Close The conference webpage is here: http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/Sartre.htm.

Business Law and Narrative Symposium, College of Law, Michigan State University, September 10-11, 2009.

Narratives are stories. Narratives both reflect and influence society, from the broadest popular cultural viewpoints down to the private communications between individuals. This dynamic process begins with the narrator, whose technique and viewpoint influence how the story is told. A successful narrative influences the viewpoint of the audience, modifying public perceptions of the subject. These changing public perceptions in turn influence the viewpoint of future narrators. Through this dynamic narrative process, public viewpoints evolve, leading to changes in the cultural, political, and legal landscapes. Business narratives include the stories told within the legal profession, as well as those communicated to the general public through a vast array of media, including news, books, movies, and the Internet. Recent business narratives include the Bernard Madoff scam, the auto industry woes, bank bailouts, and the subprime mortgage crisis. From Enron and Martha Stewart to the current crises, new villains emerge, forever changing public perceptions of business and the corporate world. A symposium at the Michigan State University College of Law invites general treatment of the question of how narrative influences the cultural and political understanding of business and how narrative might–or might not–play a role in corporate law. Recent events bring to the fore a call on narrative as a means of interpreting what has happened, with possibilities for simple explanations that attempt a narrative form. Distinguished corporate law experts and scholars in history, literature, and narrative will present their papers and discuss the challenges narrators face in creating an accessible, widely shared account of business culture, corporate law, or financial events, given the complexity of business and the abstract nature of the corporation. Do such business narratives supply a widely shared consensus comparable to large narrative understandings of other social enterprises? Do cases or scholarship deploy narrative materials? If so, how might they be evaluated as narrative? Does literature constitute a source of insight that informs the social understanding of business realities and personalities? How does gender influence narrative? MSU Law Professor Mae Kuykendall has organized the symposium to further explore the intersection of business law and narrative, as discussed in her 2007 article, "No Imagination: The Marginal Role of Narrative in Corporate Law." Distinguished corporate law experts and scholars in history, literature, and narrative will gather to address these questions on September 11, 2009, at the Michigan State University College of Law. The Michigan State Law Review will publish the papers presented in what promises to be a trenchant discussion of an important topic. We invite you to join us for our discussion of business law and narrative. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.law.msu.edu/narrative/.

Vernon, Mark. "Plato's Dialogues, Part 5: Love and the Perception of Forms." GUARDIAN September 1, 2009.

That there might be a link between love and knowledge is not an idea that many philosophers think about today. But for Plato, the link is deep. In several dialogues, he implies that if you stir up the capacity to love inside you, and apply reason to direct your love in the right way, then you might achieve an understanding of what is good, beautiful and true. It is via this route that he appears to have gained an intuition that has become very influential in western philosophy, the possible existence of transcendent Forms. But before coming to these elusive entities, let us first press this link between love and knowledge. By doing so, we'll approach the question of Forms in the way that Plato himself presents it. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/01/plato-dialogues-forms.

Rushkoff, Douglas. "Economics is not a Natural Science." EDGE August 11, 2009.

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. . . . Read the whole essay: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff09/rushkoff09_index.html.

Cfp: "Deleuze and Nomadic Methodologies," Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, July 12-14, 2010.

Co-hosted by Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University. “Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience,” Deleuze and Guattari argue in What is Philosophy?. The third annual International Deleuze Studies Conference will address the relevance of nomadic thought for contemporary scientific, critical and artistic practices. More specifically, it will explore the fast-growing new inter-connections among the three domains of art, science and philosophy, by mapping out and exploring the complex ways in which transdisciplinary encounters can be engendered. Combining critique with creation, the conference will focus on issues of methodology by positioning Deleuze’s philosophical work as the missing link among different domains of scientific enquiry, philosophical and artistic practice today. Central questions are: what are the different ways of interference among these different areas? What kind of methodological implications do their dynamic encounters entail? What are the limits of transdisciplinary connections, relations and fields? What kind of research is art practice? In a world that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how can scientific disciplines connect in distinctive and productive ways both among themselves and with practices located in the world of art and thought? The conference rests on the assumption that rhizomatic growth and inter-relations are unpredictable but this does not mean that they proceed randomly. Connections may be broken but will always continue to grow in other directions and create new encounters, new thoughts and new affects. The notion of creation itself is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated. Parallel to the conference several art events and film screenings will take place in Amsterdam and Utrecht. Conference Organizers: Prof. Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam; Prof. Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht. For more information please contact Maryn Wilkinson atconference@deleuze-amsterdam.nl. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl/.

Gordon, Peter E. Reviews of Two Books on Ernst Cassirer. NDPR (September 2009).

• Skidelsky, Edward. Ernst Cassirer: the Last Philosopher of Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.
• Barash, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Symbolic Construction of Reality: the Legacy of Ernst Cassirer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.

The rebirth of interest in the philosophical legacy of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) has taken many scholars by surprise. Cassirer suffered the great misfortune to emerge as a stalwart champion of humanism and Enlightenment rationality at the very moment such ideals were falling into eclipse, not only in Germany but arguably across Western Europe as well. His three-volume systematic treatise, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, was published in successive parts during the 1920s and completed in 1929, the final year of democratic crisis. In the same year he engaged in his famous exchange with Martin Heidegger at Davos, Switzerland, a confrontation that for many participants appeared to signal (in the words of Emmanuel Lévinas, then studying at Freiburg) "the creation and the end of the world." By 1933 Cassirer had resigned from his professorship at Hamburg and together with his wife Toni fled into exile. Heidegger, meanwhile, joined the Nazi party and assumed the Freiburg rectorship. For the next decade, Cassirer and his wife led a precarious existence. They moved from Vienna to Oxford to Uppsala, Sweden, and finally made the transatlantic crossing to the United States, where Cassirer taught (mostly at Yale) until his death in 1945. He had only a handful of disciples in Germany and even fewer in the English-speaking world. The 1942 manifesto by Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, is perhaps the earliest specimen of Cassirer's influence in the United States. Many years later, Nelson Goodman would name Cassirer as a major inspiration for his 1978 Ways of Worldmaking, portions of which Goodman first delivered at the University of Hamburg for the centennial of Cassirer's birth. But Cassirer was never a philosopher to arouse great enthusiasm. Even in his own day respectful colleagues such as Karl Jaspers were likely to confide to peers that "Cassirer bores me." Some of Cassirer's most successful students, such as the political philosopher Leo Strauss or the theorist of metaphor and modernity Hans Blumenberg, utterly revised much of what Cassirer hoped to achieve. Rudolf Carnap (who was also in the audience during the disputation at Davos) characterized Cassirer as "rather pastoral." Isaiah Berlin judged him "serenely innocent," and Adorno (never one to mince words) called him "totally gaga" (Skidelsky 125). As Edward Skidelsky observes in the introductory remarks to his new study of the philosopher's career, Cassirer's "thought remains, when all is said and done, a stranger to our age" (7). How then to explain the renaissance of Cassirer-scholarship in Germany and North America? . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17346.

Blog Talk Radio: "The Technologizing of the Word: the Philosophy of Walter Ong, SJ." Interview with Thomas J. Farrell. September 10, 2009 at 7 pm.

In this show, we discuss the fascinating and profound ideas of Walter Ong, S.J. with Dr. Thomas J. Farrell, a renowned Ong scholar. Author of numerous articles on Ong as well as the critically acclaimed, Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, Dr. Farrell will discuss Ong's philosophy about the relationship amongst the spoken word (primary orality), the written word (literacy) and technology (secondary orality). We will introduce the listener to some of the ideas of Ong, and will demonstrate their poignancy and relevancy as the internet evolves into Web 3.0 -- and arguably into a new (tertiary) form of orality and the spoken word. Listen by visiting here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Ethics-Talk/2009/09/10/The-Technologizing-of-the-Word-The-Philosophy-of-Walter-Ong-SJ.

"After Freud Left: Centennial Reflections on his 1909 Visit to the United States," New York Academy of Medicine, October 3-4, 2009.

In 1909, Sigmund Freud made his only visit to the United States. He arrived in New York, spent much time there, and departed from New York. This symposium will meet in New York exactly one hundred years after his arrival back in Vienna to consider what happened to his ideas and his networks in America in the century after he left. Some speakers will consider the setting of 1909. Others will review developments in the next century, for example in American social sciences in general, or in the supposed Americanization of the world. This symposium is strictly historical, looking at the long view. It will NOT take up either current theoretical and clinical controversies or the “Freud Wars” controversies. The purpose, rather, is to stimulate mature reflection. The exact topic of each speaker is still under negotiation, but all of them are thinking in terms of general, significant papers of interest to an informed public. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.nyam.org/events/?id=448&click.

Cfp: "Technology, Textuality, and Transmission," Third Material Cultures Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 16-18, 2010.

Keynote Speakers:

• Roger Chartier
• Jerome McGann
• Peter Stallybrass

Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at the University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission,' though proposals relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book are welcome:

• Materiality and Textuality
• Electronic Text
• The Cultures of Print
• Censhorship and Regulation
• Collections and their Preservation
• Readers and Reading Practices
• Technology and Transmission
• The Information Revolution
• Geographies of the Book

Proposals of 200-300 words are invited on these or any other topic related to the history of the book, to be sent no later than 30 November 2009, to Material Cultures, Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh, 22a Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW or by email to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach?" THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES August 27, 2009.

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it. Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization. It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.” The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun. That should be the real core of any curriculum. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/.

"Rhetoric and Narcissism," Southern Colloquium on Rhetoric, Department of Communication, College of Charleston, September 18, 2009.

The Department of Communication at the College of Charleston will host a meeting of SCoR from 1-5 pm on September 18. The topic for this meeting is rhetoric and narcissism. For further details, consult the reading list, and the extensive visitor and travel information provided by our host, chair of CoC’s Dept of Communication, Brian McGee. The text for this meeting will be Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech (aka, “the malaise speech”), and Pat Caddell, one of the writers for that speech will join us for part of the seminar. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.southerncolloqrhetoric.net/web/.

Holberg International Memorial Prize Awarded to Ian Hacking

The Holberg International Memorial Prize for 2009 for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology is awarded to Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and Collège de France Ian Hacking. Read the rest here: http://www.holbergprisen.no/en/ian-hacking.html.

Wright, Robert. "A Grand Bargain Over Evolution." NEW YORK TIMES August 22, 2009.

THE “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out. Still, the war continues, and it’s not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims. There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings. I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.

Price, Matthew. "The End Was Nigh." THE NATIONAL August 20, 2009.

The West, it seems, is living through a golden age of civilisational anxiety, marked by endless agonising about the uncertain future: its loss of power, the climate crisis, terrorism, rogue nuclear weapons, economic collapse, the unchecked flow of immigrants across borders. Whether the calamities envisioned by today’s Cassandras will come to pass cannot be determined, but our vivid imagination for disaster has long and deep roots. Indeed, the story of the West might be seen as tale of progress married to peril. Advances in technology, governance, and standards of living have been accompanied by new anxieties and an uneasy self-consciousness about the fragility of such gains. Technology appears as wonder and horror alike, both panacea and mortal threat. We twitter blissfully away on our laptops, worrying all the while about the collapse of the electronic infrastructure on which we now depend – or the malignant ends to which it could so easily be turned. One law of civilisation might be cast as follows: Every strength needs to be opposed by a perceived existential threat. The sum of these fears – or their apotheosis – is the belief that civilisation (read: “the West”) is fated to decline, to be subdued from without or collapse from within. This too, is not a new idea. History, it is true, has often been narrated as a Whiggish tale of continual progress – that “It’s getting better all the time”, as Sir Paul McCartney put it. But this uplifting Enlightenment sentiment has always been opposed by a darker view, one that stresses the cycles of history, the tendency for what has risen to fall again – a physics of decline with its own martial undertones, including the unmistakable implication that the West, fat and happy with the fruits of its technological and cultural sophistication, is blithely tottering on the brink of oblivion. Few thinkers savaged Europe’s faith in progress with the ferocity of Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that anything called “progress” was a mere illusion – if there was even such a thing, he suggested, its flowering could only give way to dissolution. Nietzsche’s ideas were carried into the 20th century by Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West became the ur-text of declinism in the 1920s. About history, Spengler concluded: “I see no progress, no goal no path for humanity.” Spengler’s pessimism squared nicely with the gloomy mood of Europe after the First World War. If his book appears now as a curious artefact of its time, it helped to establish a template of decline – and a rhetoric to evoke its inevitability – that endures today, a kind of civilisational pessimism that exists at all points among the ideological spectrum; the declinists of the left and right obsess over very different threats, but the essential dynamic transcends politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090821/REVIEW/708209984/1008.