No. 18: doomscrolling, barbarity, and migration

Arendt/Aurelius/Bacon/Descartes/Hegel/Hobbes/Homer/Shelley/Woolf

Here's some things people have been writing:

Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning, rethought what were the ends of knowledge production. His thinking helped to spawn the Scientific Revolution. Today we’re on the edge of an A.I. revolution and should again reconsider. aeon

Hegel, in his Science of Logic, coined the term “bad infinity” to designate a never-ending road with no end goal. A “true infinity” would be more like a circle, something that feels whole. It sounds abstract, but bad infinity is plain to see in the modern addiction to “doomscrolling”. thereader.mitpress

Hobbes was the first and last great liberal philosopher. His hard-nosed “realism” was a veil covering his deeper feelings of utopia with the individual at the center. To understand why liberalism seems to have passed away today its worth looking back at what Hobbes thought. newstatesman

Woolf’s talk of Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One’s Own presaged queer literature. Shelley’s Frankenstein—and the circumstances in which she wrote it—is also a favorite of critics who study queer literature. newyorker

Arendt warned of unrestrained government power in Origins of Totalitarianism. Her words echo in new migration policies that effectively end the asylum system in the EU. verfassungsblog

Homer’s Iliad, a brutal telling of the last days of the Trojan war, has been interpreted by dozens, if not hundreds of writers. Emily Wilson’s latest try will invite modern readers, but it lacks the barbarity that’s essential to the tale. theatlantic

Aurelius’s Meditations and Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy got conflated when someone tried to pull book recommendations from a forum with the help of chatGPT. news.ycombinator.com