Contributions by:

Thomas de Zengotita

Doctor’s Orders: Revisiting James Dobson’s Dare To Discipline

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To read Dr. James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline (1970) is to be transported, as if by the tang of a Proustian biscuit, back to the ’60s, back to the lived reality-the very qualia of that era are resurrected in this book.  But the perspective is unfamiliar.  Instead of a Bobo stroll down the lane of…

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Closure for You, Jedermensch ein Übermensch

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         The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you.  We have killed him-you and I… But how did we do this?  How could we drink up the sea?  Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?  What were we…

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The Other Side

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At first only a few of us noticed, and we didn’t talk about it until later—though most of us probably tried to check with someone early on. I know I did. Putting it as a matter of curiosity, in passing, but seriously, the way you might ask “Have you ever had a dream where you…

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Modernism Revisited: Artistic Works, Academic Disciplines, Divided Minds

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“If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in darkness, cold, and silence… Life knows us not and we do not know life—we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after…

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A Phenomenological Foundation for Human Ethics: An Essay in Philosophical Anthropology

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A Limit to Contingency  In The Last Utopia (2012), Samuel Moyn famously argued that “human rights” as a principle transcending the prerogatives of nation-states did not actually emerge until the 1970s.  The idea in this “pure” form only appeared then because it stood out in that context as “the God that did not fail while other political ideologies…

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