Very pleased to see a Latvian translation of my essay on machine intelligence & Mary Shelley's "modern Prometheus". (Thanks entirely to Zane Ozola.) Points touched on: Descartes' girl-machine (he's said to have built an android), La Mettrie's man-machine, Vico's cogito-joke, & vengeance (divine, & machine). Read here, in Telos magazine.
Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury
Postdoctoral fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author of The Space of Time (2014), Platonic Legislations (2017), The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (2021), and Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature (2021). Regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, etc.
New Budapest lecture on Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays
What is Europe? & what is the "old European principle of care for the soul"? - Very pleased to be giving a lecture this evening at the Danube Institute in Budapest, with a reply by Ferenc Hörcher, about Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays IV, "Europe & the European Heritage until the End of the 19th Century"
Return to Scheler? Johannes Hoff’s new book —
A pleasure to pass a couple of days with philosophical theologian Johannes Hoff in Haydn country (a wine village by the Neusiedler See) discussing his new opus, Verteidigung des Heiligen. Anthropologie der digitalen Transformation. Max Scheler is the man of the hour, says Hoff.
Third Patočka lecture: “Politics & the Core of Mystery”
"Humans cannot live in the certitude of meaninglessness”, yet history "seems to exude meaninglessness". I'm giving my third Patočka lecture tonight in Budapest: on metaphysics & nihilism (& Marxism as crypto-nihilism), on human survival & the mystery of the world.
“Elegant, lucid prose”: A new review of The Innocence of Pontius Pilate
"Mr Dusenbury’s wide erudition that stretches from ancient history to the political philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau masters the complexities of the story, while his elegant, lucid prose guides the general reader through them." — The Irish Catholic
First lecture on Jan Patočka’s dissident philosophy of history
Tomorrow in Budapest: Gilgamesh on death; Thales on gods; Richard Avenarius on "the human world-concept"; Martin Heidegger on "the deep phenomenon"; Miklós Szentkuthy on the sexlessness of mathematical physics; all to introduce Jan Patočka's dissident philosophy of history ---
Bataille: “Towards the unknown”
"Poetry describes nothing that does not slip towards the unknown."- Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
from Jan Patočka’s “Political Testament”
"What is needed is for people to behave at all times with dignity, not to allow themselves to be frightened & intimidated, & to speak the truth." - Jan Patočka, "Political Testament," 1977
Ecce Homo: Jesus & Pilate in the History of Secularity (Emory University)
Julia Kristeva says that "the 'genius of Christianity' has introduced radical innovations … we have not done taking the measure of." I try to take the measure of 'secularity' in a new essay for Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion on my Hurst & Oxford book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate.… Continue reading Ecce Homo: Jesus & Pilate in the History of Secularity (Emory University)
The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: Digital edition
I am pleased to see that Oxford University Press has released a digital edition of The Innocence of Pontius Pilate. See here.
D. L. Dusenbury 