Friday 26 May 2023 — Back in newsletter 170 I wrote about how I had changed my mind on the idea of planetary civilization — previously I had considered our global civilization a de facto planetary civilization lacking only legal and political unification, whereas I had since come to see that Earth now consists of…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of J. Glenn Gray (27 May 1913–30 October 1977), who was born in rural Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, on this date in 1913. …

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 160th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Rickert (25 May 1863–25 July 1936), who was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on this date in 1863. I have had occasion to mention Rickert in several other profiles, including those of Windelband, Weber, and others. Rickert’s name comes…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — On 23 May 1618, 405 years ago today, the 1618 Defenestration of Prague occurred. What is, or what was, the 1618 Defenestration of Prague? “Defenestration” means to throw someone out of the window, and there have been several famous defenestrations in Prague. However, the 1618 Defenestration of Prague is especially…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 118th anniversary of the birth of Paul Oskar Kristeller (22 May 1905–07 June 1999), who was born in Berlin on this date in 1905. Kristeller is known as a scholar of the renaissance and the author of several books on renaissance thought. I had had occasion to…

Friday 19 May 2023 — In previous newsletters I have mentioned that after writing a short blog post on preserving the International Space Station that I had turned this into a paper. A couple of friends have read this and given me helpful feedback, so I am working on minor revisions to it. …

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 392nd anniversary of the Sack of Magdeburg, which occurred on 20 May 1631. In last year’s post on the Sack of Magdeburg, I quoted Frederick Schiller’s account of the sack in his The History of the Thirty Years War, which emphasized the horrors of “Magdeburgization” (“Magdeburgisieren”), which…

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History — Today is the 261st anniversary of the birth of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (19 May 1762–29 January 1814), who was born in Rammenau, Saxony (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) on this day in 1762. Fichte is known as an immediate successor to Kant in the German idealist tradition. While…

Friday 12 May 2023 — Some months ago a friend wrote to me and asked me what I thought of the “metacrisis.” I wrote back a rather skeptical and critical email, panning the very idea of a metacrisis, which I took to be a production of the chattering classes, without any real weight behind it…