Articles

There is an experience nearly all of us have had and very few can explain: listening to a piece of music — a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart adagio, an unexpected chord in some ordinary song — and feeling something that cannot be put into words. It is not joy, not sadness, not any nameable emotion. It is as if the music touched a layer of our existence that lies beneath language, beneath thought, beneath everything we call “self.” Why does this happen? Why does music move us in a way that painting, poetry, and sculpture — however beautiful — can never quite replicate? ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

Friedrich Nietzsche died in 1900, yet he seems to have written his books for the twenty-first century. The German philosopher who proclaimed “God is dead” was not celebrating — he was issuing a bleak diagnosis of what happens when an entire civilization loses the foundation that organized its values. In today’s world, that diagnosis resonates with unsettling precision: we live in an era of meaning crisis, of collapsing values, of diffuse nihilism concealed beneath layers of digital entertainment, social media, and consumerism. Nietzsche did not merely predict this scenario — he described in detail what was coming. ...

Few contemporary philosophers divide opinion as sharply as Judith Butler. For some, she is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century — someone who revolutionized our understanding of gender, sexuality, and power. For others, she is the ultimate symbol of a philosophy that lost itself in the labyrinth of its own language, producing deliberately obscure texts to mask shallow ideas. To understand why Butler provokes such extreme reactions, we must first grasp what she actually says — and then have the intellectual honesty to identify where the argument falters. ...

This is the fifth and final article on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). We have traced the full arc of Maréchal’s historical project: from the ancient Greek tradition and Scholasticism (Cahier I), through the rationalist-empiricist conflict (Cahier II), into the depths of Kant’s critical philosophy (Cahier III), and through the analysis of post-Kantian idealism from Fichte through Schelling to Hegel (Cahier IV). In this fifth article, we arrive at Cahier V — Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique — the heart of the work, published in 1926 — where Maréchal undertakes a systematic comparison of Thomism with critical philosophy and presents his own original philosophical argument: that intellectual dynamism toward Absolute Being is a transcendental condition of the very possibility of knowledge, and that a genuine metaphysics of being is therefore not merely defensible but philosophically necessary. ...

This is the third of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the first two articles, we followed Maréchal’s historical survey from the ancient Greek tradition through medieval Scholasticism (Cahier I) and then through the modern conflict between rationalism and empiricism (Cahier II). That survey ended with Hume’s devastating skepticism — the revelation that neither the rationalist appeal to innate ideas nor the empiricist appeal to sense experience could ground the objective necessity that genuine knowledge requires. In this third article, we turn to Cahier III, which Maréchal devotes entirely to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason — the most ambitious attempt in modern philosophy to answer Hume’s challenge, and the text that casts the longest shadow over Maréchal’s entire project. ...

This is the second of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). In the first article, we followed Maréchal’s reading of the classical tradition from the pre-Socratics through Thomas Aquinas, showing how ancient and medieval thought largely assumed a direct cognitive contact with being without needing to systematically justify that assumption. In this second article, we turn to Cahier II, in which Maréchal examines the great modern debate between rationalism and empiricism — and shows how both traditions, despite opposing each other on almost every point, ultimately leave the problem of objectivity unresolved and prepare the ground for Kant’s revolutionary critique. ...

This is the first of five articles dedicated to Joseph Maréchal’s monumental work Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics), published in five notebooks (cahiers) between 1922 and 1947. Each article follows one cahier, tracing Maréchal’s ambitious project: to demonstrate, through a rigorous historical and critical method, that a genuine metaphysics of being is not only possible after Kant but is in fact demanded by the very structure of human knowledge. This first article covers Cahier I, which examines the classical tradition from ancient Greece through the end of medieval Scholasticism. ...

Imagine a world where everything that happens — a storm, a failed harvest, a child being born — is explained by the will of some god. For millennia, humanity lived within this mythical vision of the cosmos. Then, around the 6th century BC, in a small coastal city of Asia Minor called Miletus, something extraordinary happened: a group of thinkers decided to ask why without appealing to the gods. This shift — from mythos to logos, from myth to reason — is one of the most decisive moments in human intellectual history. The men who played a leading role in this transformation are called pre-Socratics: the philosophers who preceded Socrates and founded, with their bold questions, the Western philosophical tradition. ...