Rémi Brague’s Europe, la voie romaine
Europe, la voie romaine. Rémi Brague. Folio Essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Reason defines men, not the other way around. Had such an Aristotelian-like proposal constituted the…
Tilo Schabert’s Lecture “The Biggest Challenge of Our Time?”
Please see Tilo Schabert's Lecture, "The Biggest Challenge of Our Time?"at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest on the problem of "migration." The YouTube link is available…
Democracy in the New Europe
Voegelin’s essay, “Democracy in the New Europe” (1959), was written in a period of transition in Eric Voegelin’s career, having left Louisiana State University in the United…
Magna Carta and Christian Culture
The significance of this document is emphasized by a recent controversy: in October of 2015, Chinese authorities blocked an exhibition of a rare parchment copy of the…
Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich
Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Eric Kurlander. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Reading Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters awoke my memory…
Jan Patočka’s Socratic Message for the 21st Century
I will be focusing on the following questions: What is the place of these texts in the corpus of Patocka’s works? How do they fit into the…
The Price of Velvet: Thomas Masaryk and Vaclav Havel
The study is concerned with the specific nature of two velvet revolutions in Czech history – in 1918 and 1989 – and with the philosophy of the…
Common Sense and Central Europe
An elementary fact in the history of thought is the emergence of philosophical schools around prominent thinkers. The disciples of a Master strived to preserve his work…
Tilo Schabert’s Lectures on Germany and France
Please see Tilo Schabert's two lectures, available on YouTube. His lecture on "The German Revolution 1989." It is available here. His lecture about the 2017 French Presidential…
The True Form of Governments: Plato, Persons, and Helmut Kohl
All forms of political order are phenomena of movements. The classic typology of political constitutions that Plato elaborated and Aristotle modified to an extent therefore represents both:…
How the World is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany
The Venice Roundtable François Mitterrand related the following episode several times afterward – to SPD [The German Social Democratic Party] president Hans-Jochen Vogel, Spanish prime minister Felipe…
“The German Question is a European Question”: France and the Reunification of Germany. A Critical Assessment.
A Critical Assessment[1] Apparently, historiography takes shape in the form of battles. It began at historiography's beginning,[2] when, to cite the most telling example, Cicero called Herodotus…
Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood
Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood. Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. In his seminal article, “Multiple Modernities in an Age of Globalization,” Shmuel…
The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe
The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe. Michael Gubser. Stanford University Press, 2014. With the on-going civilizational crisis that began with the…
The Disintegration of Traditional Civilizations
In the summer issue of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article by Samuel Huntington under the title “The Clash of Civilizations?” whose themes he enlarged…