Monstrous Moderns Without an Alibi

Scientists announced on January 26th, the first successful human-animal hybrid. It is yet another confirmation that modern monstrousness has been unleashed. We are well into the epoch of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To be modern increasingly means to live within the blurred lines of the acceptable and unacceptable. Revealed in the new sapiens-pig species is that…

Philosophers in the Cognitive Mines

American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead writes in Modes of Thought: “If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken” (MT, 1938, 237). Unlike religious mystics who look to the upper regions of the “unspoken”, philosophers are tasked with going into the deep. As lovers…