How should a human creature react to a true statement? Where do we allow the written word to take us today, if anywhere? Where would a true word, written or spoken, say we are, and where does it say we're going? What has been the power of the written word throughout our history, which in our secular age we seem on guard against, providing as it does with a regaining of orientation and direction which the modern world cannot abide, for the fact that it has no patience for any  statements which would reveal the shortcomings of its own project: that of 'modernity'? A true statement has always been felt as a knife piercing the illusion of ourselves we have built up, and the world as a whole has a similar self it seeks to protect from such piercing statements.

Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

What does a people fight and give their lives for? What order and sense of history does a community seek to maintain—and is it accidental or arbitrary, or is it the only thing a people has to combat the chaos inherent to the universe, which in one form or another is always threatening to consume a people's identity and way of life?

Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

This episode is mostly an elaboration upon one of the arguments in Alenka Zupancic's book 'Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan'.

Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

The perennial problem, revisited in today's age, of what the philosopher is really aiming to achieve: whether it is to align with what is, in contemplative fashion, or, as seems more favored these days, to take their so-called insight and bring into reality a future and world we want for ourselves. In this episode we are in doubt as to whether that latter option is possible, and conclude it might even be naive.  

Substack entry I read in this episode: https://aboutreality.substack.com/p/feb-9-2022

Follw me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

The world seems to be hanging suspended, in a limbo state, caught in between the reality of the past and that of the future, the latter of which has yet to be determined, yet no one seems to be offering any clear vision of what that future reality might look like. As a result there is a lot of tension in the mind of the average individual, who no longer knows how to plan or invest for their future—they can't count on things remaining so stable as they have been for the last few decades; even the land under their feet is changing, and entire cities worth of people may soon be on the move, in need of more hospitable terrain. What is the path forward?

Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

I would just like to add, as far as 'where the knowledge is found', and our relationship to the wisdom accrued through our contact with deep time – it is a wisdom to be gained through our bodies too, which are a product of deep time, of billions of years of evolution of life. This is why I emphasize the body – not that the body has or possesses such wisdom, but that it is the wisdom which we need to meditate upon.

Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

Would the philosopher be wise to do so? Is it the project of the statesman? Has it been the naive project of the west all along? What mode of being, given the state of nature and the world at present, is actually the wisest of all? Such are the questions asked in this episode.

Check out the 'About Reality' Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow E. S. Dallaire on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

In the first half of this episode I reintroduce the 'About Reality' project, to outline the intention of both the podcast as well as the companion Substack as we head into the new year. In the second half I get to talking about the language the philosopher might use to capture and convey philosophical ideas that are worth considering in the world of 2022.

Check out the About Reality Substack: https://aboutreality.substack.com/

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

The second stage of philosophical development is a self-discipline or even a self-denial—but toward what end?

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESDallaire

An argument for the return of our attention to areas of linguistic, artistic, and cultural expression outside of the domain of the institutions of our time, which dominate the cultural and social narrative the individual has to attend to, for the fact that they mediate most of our cultural, and cross-cultural, communication. We have to find other spaces (call them platforms, if you'd like) in which to express our concern for other facets of the human experience, which these institutional narratives seem to be forgetting, or outright ignoring.