Year: 2026
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Living in the Interval: Quantum Mechanics and the Experience of Time
What happens when a quantum clock runs below zero? Building on my earlier essay on quantum entanglement, this piece explores the recent Toronto experiments on “negative time,” the four-dimensional block universe, and Kant’s intuition of inner sense—asking what it means for human history when we stop mistaking our clocks for the heartbeat of the cosmos.
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The World on Fire? Geopolitical Realignment and the Horizon of 2040
We have become remarkably skilled at creating the crises that threaten us, yet strangely helpless at resolving them. Wars, political fragmentation, technological upheaval, and ecological damage are largely self-inflicted. But history is also a story of adaptation and recovery. Looking toward 2040, I explore how shifting global power, aging societies, and new technologies might reshape our troubled world.
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What Makes Things Happen? Reflections on Causality
What does it mean to say that one thing causes another? Beginning with Aristotle’s final causes, I trace my longstanding fascination with causality through Hume’s skepticism, Kant’s categories of understanding, and quantum mechanics. Perhaps causality is neither a fundamental property of nature nor merely a habit of thought, but an emergent structure through which we understand the world and act…
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How the Word Becomes Flesh: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Absorption of Ideology
Why do beliefs and ideologies so easily defeat critical thinking? Because they were never arguments. Ideology is a play with identities: a metaphor loses its “like,” a shared feature becomes an identity, and language supplies the rest without our noticing. With Lacan on metaphor and metonymy, Livy’s fable of the belly, and Adorno’s identity thinking, this essay shows how nations…
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On Loss, Resentment, and the Question of Forgiveness
Why does the injured psyche choose the heat of resentment over the emptiness of grief? Drawing on André Green’s “dead mother” and Robert Karen’s work on forgiveness, this essay traces how unmourned childhood loss becomes the architecture of adult bitterness—and why to blame a parent is still to have one. Forgiveness, it argues, is not only a virtue, but a…
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Who Is He? — Rereading Plato’s Gorgias.
Sophistry is speech between two: whoever prevails is right. Philosophy introduces a third term—truth, justice, the Good—that neither speaker controls, and before which both must answer. Plato’s Gorgias stages this difference through Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. Its diagnosis reaches our own moment, where algorithms, polling, and AI have perfected persuasion by quietly removing the third from public speech.
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Elegie, after the Genjō Kōan
No one hears us now. Good. Praise was always a way of not looking. The boat moves. We say the shore moves. From this one mistake a self is built. Look at the water: nothing on board was ever still. Firewood does not become ash. We do not say winter becomes spring. My mother is not behind me. Her death…
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The Pulse and the Arrow: Recovering Rhythm in a Linear World
Modern civilization suffers from temporal vertigo. The simultaneity in a global civilization does not know day and night. We live under the sun yet follow the clock, trapped in a “metronomic society,” governed by linear, mechanical time rather than biological and cosmic rhythms. This essay examines the ancient tension between cyclical and linear dimensions of existence, exploring the resulting alienation…
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The Law of the Heart and the Law of Nations
From the theological roots of Imago Dei to today’s International Court of Justice, this essay traces human rights as the struggle to protect the person from being reduced to an object. As a new age of global power politics threatens the liberal international order, the defense of human dignity requires not only law but literature, and the steadfast recognition of…