The author reviews two adaptations of Anthem as a graphic novel and a third book, The Age of Selfishness, that combines a biography of Rand with an account of the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century and her putative responsibility for it. The graphic novels are both enjoyable versions of Rand's thought-provoking science-fiction novella, to different degrees; the nonfiction book is filled with distortions, polemic, and caricature.

Le rôle de l’Etat face aux catastrophes naturelles est examiné en fonction des critères d’ efficacité et de liberté. Les bureaucraties d’assistance face aux désastres ont des points communs, mais aussi d’importantes différences, avec celles de la santé publique. Certains programmes gouvernementaux faits pour assister les victimes de catastrophes naturelles ont des effets pervers en créant plus de souffrance, et d’autres entretiennent activement les comportements irresponsables. Le rôle de l’Etat en tant que coordinateur des efforts d’assistance est justifié, mais il (...) se trouve qu’il n’est pas logiquement nécessaire.The role of the state in responding to natural disasters is examined with an eye to questions of both efficacy and liberty. Disaster relief bureaucracies have some similarities to, but important differences from, welfare relief bureaucracies. Some government programs designed to assist the victims of natural disasters have perverse effects of creating more suffering, and others actively foster irresponsible behavior. The role of the state in coordinating relief efforts is justified, but turns out not to be logically necessary. (shrink)

Le rôle de l’Etat face aux catastrophes naturelles est examiné en fonction des critères d’ efficacité et de liberté. Les bureaucraties d’assistance face aux désastres ont des points communs, mais aussi d’importantes différences, avec celles de la santé publique. Certains programmes gouvernementaux faits pour assister les victimes de catastrophes naturelles ont des effets pervers en créant plus de souffrance, et d’autres entretiennent activement les comportements irresponsables. Le rôle de l’Etat en tant que coordinateur des efforts d’assistance est justifié, mais il (...) se trouve qu’il n’est pas logiquement nécessaire.The role of the state in responding to natural disasters is examined with an eye to questions of both efficacy and liberty. Disaster relief bureaucracies have some similarities to, but important differences from, welfare relief bureaucracies. Some government programs designed to assist the victims of natural disasters have perverse effects of creating more suffering, and others actively foster irresponsible behavior. The role of the state in coordinating relief efforts is justified, but turns out not to be logically necessary. (shrink)

Imagine some policy P about which a scholar said “The best way to help people escape from poverty would be P.” Is this a claim about political philosophy or economics? On the one hand, it seems to be an empirical statement, but there is a normative component as well. Besides the obvious normativity of “best,” there is the tacit implication that poverty is bad and that this is at least some reason to endorse P. But the fact that one can (...) easily imagine either a political philosopher or an economist making the claim points to one reason for the recent growth of programs in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), programs of study which emphasize the interdisciplinary connection between political philosophy and the social sciences. Political philosophy is, of course, philosophy, which means it is a combination of analytic and normative tools, but since its subject matter involves human behavior and social institutions, empirical study of those seems like it should be relevant as well. Since political philosophy addresses questions about the social order, findings from the social sciences are surely relevant, chiefly from economics and political science. At first glance this seems directly analogous to the way philosophy of cognitive science would find relevance from work in neurology. But social scientists are themselves often beholden to normative priors which frame their methodology. The increased popularity of and growth of programs in PPE is therefore definitely beneficial both to the philosophers and to the social scientists who explore these issues. However, while the empirical is relevant, and, I would argue, essential, to good work in political philosophy, I would resist the suggestion that the empirical is exhaustive and that the philosophical is either superfluous or unwarranted. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Freedom and Constraint What were you Thinking? Style and Substance Acknowledgment Notes.

Known for restoring vitality and superior craftsmanship to the crime thriller, American filmmaker Michael Mann has long been regarded as a talented triple threat capable of moving effortlessly between television and feature films as a writer, director, and executive producer. His unique visual sense and thematic approach are evident in the Emmy Award-winning The Jericho Mile, the cult favorite The Keep, the American epic The Last of the Mohicans, and the Academy Award-nominated The Insider as well as his most recent (...) works -- Ali, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies. The Philosophy of Michael Mann provides an up-to-date and comprehensive account of the work of this highly accomplished filmmaker, exploring the director's recognizable visual style and the various on-screen and philosophical elements he has tested in his thirty-five-year career. The essays in this wide-ranging book will appeal to fans of the revolutionary filmmaker and to philosophical scholars interested in the themes and conflicts that drive his movies. (shrink)

Here we can find out about irony and the meaning of life, the politics of the nuclear family, Marxism in Springfield, the elusiveness of happiness, popular parody as a form of tribute, and why we need animated TV shows. As if all that weren't enough, this book actually contains the worst philosophy essay ever.

This collection of essays seeks to explore Tibor R. Machan’s philosophical ideas by considering some of the basic issues with which he has been concerned throughout his long and highly productive career.

Film noir reflects the fatalistic themes and visual style of hard-boiled novelists and many émigré filmmakers in 1940s and 1950s America, emphasizing crime, alienation, and moral ambiguity. In The Philosophy of TV Noir, Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble argue that the legacy of film noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Sleep is also found in episodic television from the mid-1950s to the present. In this first-of-its-kind collection, contributors from philosophy, (...) film studies, and literature raise fundamental questions about the human predicament, giving this unique volume its moral resonance and demonstrating why television noir deserves our attention. The introduction traces the development of TV noir and provides an overview and evaluation of the book's thirteen essays, each of which discusses an exemplary TV noir series. Realism, relativism, and integrity are discussed in essays on Dragnet, Naked City, The Fugitive, and Secret Agent. Existentialist themes of authenticity, nihilism, and the search for life's meaning are addressed in essays on Miami Vice, The Sopranos, Carnivale, and 24. The methods of crime scene investigation in The X-Files and CSI are examined, followed by an exploration of autonomy, selfhood, and interpretation in The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Millennium. With this focus on the philosophical dimensions of crime, espionage, and science fiction series, The Philosophy of TV Noir draws out the full implications of film noir and establishes TV noir as an art form in its own right. (shrink)

The volume contains a reply essay by Rasmussen and Den Uyl.

In fifteen witty essays, fifteen philosophers answer the questions of what writer, director, actor, comedian, musician, and deep thinker Woody Allen is trying to say and why anyone should care. Original.

Tibor Machan's latest book The Virtue of Liberty represents the newest instance of an increasing trend toward naturalist defenses of libertarianism. This is a different sort of defense than the traditional natural-rights conception, such as might be found in Locke, or the various consequentialist approaches, such as might be found in Mill or Hayek. The sort of naturalist defense that has been becoming increasingly prominent is based on a neo-Aristotelian conception of human flourishing, and on the necessity of political freedom (...) to its realization. Actually, Machan has been toiling in these vineyards since the 1970s, and although this approach to defending classical liberalism is still a minority view in the academy, recent years have seen great growth in this area Human flourishing, the argument goes, depends on the use of particular human virtues in the development of self-directed behavior. Practical reason is seen as a necessary condition of human well-being. If the application of reason to self-directed behavior is the crucial element in human flourishing, then humans need to be free to develop and pursue their own ends, at least to the extent that this pursuit does not infringe on others' ability to do the same. Rights are then natural rights in the sense that they follow from the nature of human being. This differs from the Lockean tradition of deriving rights from God's laws, although the rights derived are similar in scope, namely, they are conceived as negative rights only, or freedoms. (shrink)

This unconventional and lighthearted introduction to the ideas of the major Western philosophers examines The Simpsons — TV’s favorite animated family. The authors look beyond the jokes, the crudeness, the attacks on society — and see a clever display of irony, social criticism, and philosophical thought. The writers begin with an examination of the characters. Does Homer actually display Aristotle’s virtues of character? In what way does Bart exemplify American pragmatism? The book also examines the ethics and themes of the (...) show, and concludes with discussions of how the series reflects the work of Aristotle, Marx, Camus, Sartre, and other thinkers. (shrink)

Aeon Skoble and other libertarians fail to show that libertarianism supports anarchism. The focus on whether persons would rationally consent to the state misses the issue. Instead, the truth of anarchism depends on whether all or most persons actually have consented to the state. Tacit consent to the acquisition of property rights in previously unowned things provides us with a model as to how valid consent might occur. However, whether persons actually have done so is an empirical issue.

Socioeconomic inequality is perpetuated and exacerbated by an overlooked yet serious epidemic of time theft: the act of causing others to lose their time without adequate cause, compensation, or consent. We explain why time theft goes unnoticed, how it drives socioeconomic inequality, and what businesses and policymakers can do to address it.

Fifteen distinguished contributors free present up-to-date arguments for the libertarian alternative. Part One introduces libertarianism and outlines some approaches by which it might be justified. Part Two addresses how a society that embraces libertarian principles might deal with various social problems, especially those that seem to require government intervention. Part Three responds to criticisms of libertarianism from other political perspectives and presents a libertarian critique of those viewpoints. Contributors: N. Scott Arnold; James E. Chesher; Mike Gemmell; John Hospers; Gregory R. (...) Johnson; Loren E. Lomasky; Tibor R. Machan; Eric Mack; Jan Narveson; Douglas B. Rasmussen; Daniel Shapiro; Aeon Skoble; Mark Thornton; Douglas J. Den Uyl; Steven Yates. (shrink)

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies introduces four new Advisory Board members—Laurence I. Gould, Kirsti Minsaas, Aeon J. Skoble, and Edward W. Younkins—as well as a new Associate Editor: Roger E. Bissell. This issue is dedicated to the memory of Advisory Board member and JARS contributor, the late Steven Horwitz.

Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology describes the cosmos as a collection of successive universes, the so-called aeons. The beginning and ending of our universe are directly connected to two other, anterior and posterior, universes. Penrose considers but rules out a different interpretation of conformal cyclic cosmology: that the beginning of our universe is connected to its own end in a cosmic loop. The paper argues that the view, aeon monism, should be regarded as a natural interpretation of conformal cyclic cosmology (...) and discusses its implications for the concept of eternal return in light of the most popular metaphysics of time. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 780-795, July 2022.

In ‘Aeon’ magazine, 2 August 2017, Professor Paul Russell maintains that identities such as race, gender and sexual orientation have equal ethical standing because they cannot be discarded and they are not constituted by beliefs, values or practices. We should, he says, resist attempts to present those who identify as gay as making a choice and affirming certain values and practices that they are capable of shedding. However, such identities can be discarded and they are in part constituted by (...) beliefs, values or practices. Russell’s defence of homosexual equality, because it focuses on the inclination to homosexuality, is pointless and useless. A proper defence of homosexual equality focuses on homosexual lifestyles and argues that the choice of such lifestyles is not wrong. Whether people who choose homosexual lifestyles do so because of a natural and unchangeable inclination, or whether environment or choice plays a part in bringing about that inclination, is an interesting question for science but of no concern for politics. (shrink)

In ‘Aeon’ magazine (2 August 2017), Professor Paul Russell claims that tolerance demands that criticism of ideologies be permitted; but it also demands that criticism of natural identities be suppressed. He says that the Left’s failure to distinguish ideological from non-ideological identities has led identity politics into intolerance. I argue that Russell’s position is self-contradictory, implying that his (ideological) liberal identity both should and should not be open to criticism. Tolerance must be extended to criticism of non-ideological identities. Laws (...) against ‘hate speech’ are incompatible with tolerance. (shrink)

The singularity theorems of the 1960s showed that Lemaître’s initial symmetry assumptions were not essential for deriving a big-bang origin for a vast multitude of relativistic universe models. Yet the actual universe accords remarkably closely with models of Lemaître’s type. This is a mystery closely related to the form taken by the 2nd law of thermodynamics and is not explained by currently conventional inflationary cosmology. Conformal cyclic cosmology provides another perspective on these issues, one consequence being the necessary initial presence (...) of a dominant scalar material that interacts only gravitationally, but which must ultimately slowly decay away in a novel but perhaps detectable way. According to CCC, our current universe picture provides but one aeon of an unending succession of expanding aeons each having an initial big bang which is the conformal continuation of the remote exponential expansion of its previous aeon. The observational status of CCC is briefly discussed. (shrink)

This chapter makes the case for strong longtermism: the claim that, in many situations, impact on the long-run future is the most important feature of our actions. Our case begins with the observation that an astronomical number of people could exist in the aeons to come. Even on conservative estimates, the expected future population is enormous. We then add a moral claim: all the consequences of our actions matter. In particular, the moral importance of what happens does not depend on (...) when it happens. That pushes us toward strong longtermism. We then address a few potential concerns, the first of which is that it is impossible to have any sufficiently predictable influence on the course of the long-run future. We argue that this is not true. Some actions can reasonably be expected to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. These include reducing the risk of human extinction, preventing climate change, guiding the development of artificial intelligence, and investing funds for later use. We end by arguing that these actions are more than just extremely effective ways to do good. Since the benefits of longtermist efforts are large and the personal costs are comparatively small, we are morally required to take up these efforts. (shrink)

This is a short popular version of my views on aesthetic pleasure published in the online magazine, Aeon.

I. The development of the earth has not progressed in the way that Leibniz so hopefully envisaged three hundred years ago. Late twentieth century disillusion demonstrated by citation. II-IV. In making sense of that disillusion it is a good beginning to abstain from speculative extravagance and simply to bring the human scale of values to bear; then to inquire how far the destruction of that which we prize has been gratuitous or economically subsidized. The human scale of values is not (...) a scale of exclusively human values. It gives no licence to the instrumentalist attitude. V. The swallow or the lapwing in Cambridgeshire as a value recognized by the human scale of values, but misrepresented by many forms of economic analysis. The off-colour presuppositions of the question 'Can we afford to save the swallow in Cambridgeshire?' Will the natural framework be preserved for meaningful life, or will human beings face an aeon of inanition? VI. Every departure from policies of 'sustainability' to be justified by dire need. Incommensurability in the theory of practical reason, and in possible forms of politics. John Stuart Mill on a world with 'nothing left to the spontaneous activity of Nature'. VII. 'Nature' explicated by the use of three contrasts proposed by Hume. VIII. Respect for Nature? Roman religio and its secular-cum-precautionary counterpart. In risk analysis, are there moral asymmetries between assurable satisfaction of vital needs and probable provision of future benefits? Analogous asymmetries with respect to the reasonableness of the reliance on Nature under normal conditions and under radically altered conditions. (shrink)

Most definitions of death – whether cardiopulmonary, whole brain and brain stem, or just upper brain – include an irreversibility condition. Cessation of function is not enough to declare death. Irreversibility should be limited to an organism's ability to ‘restart’ itself after vital organs have ceased to function. However, this would mean that every hour people who cannot be revived without the intervention of medical personnel and their technology are coming back from the dead. However, the alternative of irreversibility being (...) dependent upon technology will lead to even more counterintuitive results such as: some people are dead at a particular time and place, but others in more technologically advanced eras and locations are alive despite their being in identical physical states; in the future, millions of cryogenically frozen human beings could spend centuries in a non–dead state because of the future technological breakthroughs; or large numbers of ‘frozen’ people are dead for aeons but coroners are not able to declare them so because they are unaware of what biological conditions science will never be able to reverse. So death should be defined only in non–relational biological terms with a self–starting condition similar to that once advocated by Lawrence Becker. (shrink)

Some of Wilber’s “holoarchies” are gradations of being, which he views as truth itself; however, being is delusion, and its gradations are gradations of delusion. Wilber’s supposedly universal ontogenetic holoarchy contradicts all Buddhist Paths, whereas his view of phylogeny contradicts Buddhist Tantra and Dzogchen, which claim delusion/being increase throughout the aeon to finally achieve reductio ad absurdum. Wilber presents spiritual healing as ascent; Grof and Washburn represent it as descent—yet they are all equally off the mark. Phenomenologically speaking, the (...) Dzogchen Path is “descending,” but not in Washburn’s or Grof’s sense—and “transpersonal” is not a synonym of “sanity.” A synthesis of Wilber, Grof, Washburn, Jung, Laing, Cooper and non-transpersonal authors in the framework of Wisdom traditions is imperative. (shrink)

Tradition in either of its two senses—the act of handing on , and what is handed on—is a particular instance of a law of human existence that men live in dependence on one another and by the processes of giving and receiving. So a sociologist can write, ‘If we are able to speak of real tradition, we must find the past spontaneously taken into account as the meaning of the present, without any discontinuity of social time, and without any consideration (...) of the past as irrelevant’ . ‘If democracy’, wrote Chesterton, ‘means that I give a man a vote even though he is my chauffeur, tradition means that I give a man a vote even though he is my great-great-grandfather’. What is handed on, however, is not existence of a purely biological kind, to remain always what it has been or to change very slowly over a space of aeons. Except in primitive tribes even tradition is not simply passed on as something static and timeless, and it is received by men who, though themselves in time, are not totally time-bound or restricted by what they receive. They believe themselves to be capable of significant action which is more than the repetition and reproduction of what has gone before. They are able to grasp a span of time and to call it history; they believe themselves to have a history, and they write history. (shrink)

The 20th century is the aeon for the social and national liberation of the individual. Freedom is a boon and basic right of every individual’s existence. Human freedom is infringed by certain social and economic order. This research paper undertakes the task to reveal the reasons behind the pandemonium of humankind living in capitalism; the basic fact for the rise and development of socialism around the globe. This paper is divided into six parts. Part I is introduction. Part II (...) deals with historical need to replace capitalism by socialism. Part III explores the economic decisive factors in capitalism. Part IV explores the economic decisive factors in socialism. Part V leads to threats of neo-colonialism. Part VI is conclusion. This research finally leads to the conclusion that socialism is the system for the abolition of regime of exploitation created by capitalism. It aims at transforming a just society based upon principles of equality, fraternity, democracy and fair play. (shrink)

In recent years, two schools of thought have emerged with regard to the Cambrian “explosion”. One argues that it was very quick, with phyla tumbling into existence in a virtual geological instant. The other view has a more relaxed temporal perspective. It looks to slow aeons of cryptic metazoan history, which led to a final breakthrough in the Cambrian, not in evolution but of fossilization potential. Yet both views have serious difficulties. Now, in a recent issue of Biological Reviews, Graham (...) Budd and Sören Jensen(1) argue for a third way. In an intriguing blend of functional morphology, the fossil record and cladistic thinking, they suggest that the assembly of metazoan bodyplans took place in a surprisingly straightforward manner. BioEssays 22:1053–1056, 2000. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The theme of essential futility, absurdity, utter incomprehensibility of life and death is stressed in almost allthe writings of Albert Camus. Like Buddha he was shocked by the sight of human misery and mortality. Yet, paradoxically was attracted to the essential desirability of it. Although completely ruffled by the consciousness of an ambiguous and silent God, he was not unaware of “that strange joy that comes from a tranquil conscience”, a perfect inner harmony one experiences on attaining true knowledge. Upanishads (...) are a search for this very reality underlying the flux of things. Malraux, Sartre, and others had already developed this line of thought before Camus. What is essential and original in him is, firstly, that the world’s absurdity not a cause for despair, but on the contrary, a spur to happiness. And secondly, that , mortality and suffering actually enhance the value of life: they invite men to live more intensely. In addition to absurdity another subject the Upanishads insistently deal with is ethics, the purity of human conduct. Very much in the manner of the Existentialists, the Upanishads, aeons before, hold man himself responsible for his actions. Dr. Radhakrishnan, very aptly says that Existentialism is a new name for an ancient method. In Albert Camus and India Sharad Chandra has put forward a convincing comparative study of the two philosophies as expounded in their respective literatures. Her argument is that the parallel ideas found in the two views are not mere fortuitous conclusions but, either the result of seminal influence, or emanation of a common, deeper vision. Reading of the book will help the reader to form a firm opinion. Camus had read the Gita and had attended the lectures given by Swami Shraddhananda of the Ramakrishna Mission in Paris. (shrink)

The reflections on time and eternity in patristic thinkers depend, to various degrees, both on ancient philosophy (through some authors’ philosophical formation) and on Scripture—mostly the Septuagint and/or ancient Latin versions. The most common nouns here are χρόνος (tempus in Latin) and αἰών (aevum). The latter in many patristic authors designates a long period, an age, or else this world or the world to come, according to the biblical usage analysed below. “Aeon” is divine life or a divine being (...) or emanation only in “Gnostic” writings. After an investigation into Greek philosophy, I shall pass on to the Bible and Patristic thinkers. (shrink)

In several iterations of the Gnostic ontogenetic myth, we find variations on an intriguing notion: namely, that the first rupture in the otherwise eternal and continuous procession of ‘aeons’ in the divine ‘pleroma’ is caused by a cognitive overreach and failure (the “fall of Sophia”). As much as it might contain a distant echo of certain myths concerning hubris in the classical tradition or in biblical literature, this general schema of cognitive overreach—cognitive failure—fall has no obvious parallel in Greek philosophy (...) prior to Plotinus, in some of whose more pessimistic accounts of hypostatic procession we find a similar schema, in which the generation of each ontological stratum occurs as the result of a cognitive failure on the superjacent level. If Plotinus borrowed this schema from the Gnostics, one might ask how the latter came up with it in the first place. In response, this paper makes the following three points. [1] Gnostic thinkers ultimately derived this schema from a particular juxtaposition of two profoundly aporetic Platonic passages referring to the travails of the individual soul, one certainly genuine (the description of the unexplained but catastrophic fall of the soul that fails to follow the heavenly train of the gods through the intelligible realm at Phaedrus 248c2-d3), the other quite possibly spurious (the claim that the cause of all evils is the desire, and the failure, of the soul to understand the nature of the notoriously enigmatic ‘King,’ ‘Second,’ and ‘Third,’ at 2nd Letter 312e1-313a6). [2] The Platonizing Sethian Gnostics closest to Plotinus also employed this latter source text to justify their conception of the individual soul, whose vicissitudes were understood to parallel those of Sophia. [3] This hypothesis is confirmed by evidence of tacit anti-Gnostic argumentation alluding to the 2nd Letter throughout Plotinus’ oeuvre. (shrink)

The fruit of several centuries of rationalistic thought in the West has been to reduce both the objective and the subjective poles of knowledge to a single level. In the same way that the Cogito of Descartes is based on reducing the knowing subject to a single mode of awareness, the external world which this ‘knowing self’ perceives is reduced to a spatio-temporal complex limited to a single level of reality – no matter how far this complex is extended beyond (...) the galaxies or into aeons of time, past and future. The traditional view as expressed in the metaphysical teachings of both the Eastern and Western traditions is based, on the contrary, upon a hierarchic vision of reality, not only of reality's objective aspect but also of its subjective one. Not only are there many levels of reality or existence stretching from the material plane to Absolute and Infinite Reality, but there are also many levels of subjective reality or consciousness, many envelopes of the self, leading to the Ultimate Self which is Infinite and Eternal and which is none other than the Transcendent Reality beyond. Moreover, the relation between the subjective and the objective is not bound to a single mode. There is not just one form of perception or awareness. There are modes and degrees of awareness leading from the so-called ‘normal’ perception by man of both his own ‘ego’ and the external world to awareness of Ultimate Selfhood, in which the subject and object of knowledge become unified in a single reality beyond all separation and distinction. (shrink)

I. The development of the earth has not progressed in the way that Leibniz so hopefully envisaged three hundred years ago. Late twentieth century disillusion demonstrated by citation. II-IV. In making sense of that disillusion it is a good beginning to abstain from speculative extravagance and simply to bring the human scale of values to bear; then to inquire how far the destruction of that which we prize has been gratuitous or economically subsidized. The human scale of values is not (...) a scale of exclusively human values. (Cp. Williams.) It gives no licence to the instrumentalist attitude. V. The swallow or the lapwing in Cambridgeshire (for instance) as a value recognized by the human scale of values, but misrepresented by many forms of economic analysis. The off-colour presuppositions of the question 'Can we afford to save the swallow in Cambridgeshire?' Will the natural framework be preserved for meaningful life, or will human beings face an aeon of inanition? VI. Every departure from policies of 'sustainability' to be justified by dire need. Incommensurability in the theory of practical reason, and in possible forms of politics. John Stuart Mill on a world with 'nothing left to the spontaneous activity of Nature'. VII. 'Nature' explicated by the use of three contrasts proposed by Hume. VIII. Respect for Nature? Roman religio and its secular-cum-precautionary counterpart. In risk analysis, are there moral asymmetries between assurable satisfaction of vital needs (one part of contentment) and probable provision of future benefits? Analogous asymmetries with respect to the reasonableness of the reliance on Nature under normal conditions and under radically altered conditions. (shrink)

In the first part of the essay G. Wohlfart examines fragments (mostly unpublished) in which Nietzsche criticises freedom of the will as the 'calamitous invention of the philosophers'. Then, consequently, he describes the will to power as a will without willing, so that he can analyse the 'third transformation of the spirit' in Zarathustra, showing that it comes from Nietzsche's reading of Heraclitus' 52nd Fragment. The child from the third transformation is thus the aeon from Fragment 52, and the (...) aeon is the 'world-child' whose 'playing in the world' bears the name 'will to power'. (shrink)