Blooved

At the age of 24, Werner Forssmann had a plan – to try the very first heart catheterisation on himself. Catheterisation is today a common procedure used to find heart defects, deliver medicine and open up blocked arteries. In 1956 Forssmann shared the medicine prize. In the autumn of 1929 the young surgical resident Werner […]

Flamel

The February light that seeped through the high Venetian blinds in Cecil B. DeMille’s office had the sepia tint of nitrate film left too long in a projection booth; it slid across a desk broad as a sarcophagus and crowded with ivory paperweights, devotional statuettes, and the abridged financial soul of half a dozen biblical […]

Suprise

The noon sun poured through the peristyle of the Lyceum in slow, molten sheets, glazing each cypress trunk with a resinous gleam, when a Macedonian courier, leather cracked like parched earth, slipped past the colonnade and knelt before Aristotle, his breath still dust-salted from the northern road. The philosopher—gray about the temples yet bright in […]

Metanoia

Sodden night folds round me like the bitter steam from yesterday’s mash-tub, yet I squat here, matchbox cradled in my cracked knuckles, daring the soaked wood to spark as if a flame would stitch a little warmth into the torn knees of my trousers; the tram-bell’s clang skitters through my skull, a tin angel crying […]

Imperical

introduction Empirical, etymologically, derives from Greek empeiría, from en “in” plus peîra “trial, attempt, experience,” designating knowledge that arises from having been in an encounter rather than from deduction or revelation; the word’s semantic core is not “data” but exposure, risk, and undergoing. In classical Greek medicine, especially among the Empirikoi, empeiría named a polemical […]

Unum

* Briefly, tell me what Hume’s assault on causality is. Very briefly. Hume argued that what we call “cause and effect” is no more than the mind’s habit of associating events that regularly follow one another; we never perceive a necessary connection, only successive impressions, so the supposed necessity of causation is an unsupported psychological […]

désir

Conditions of Impossibility the family, civil society, and the state “a desire that does not lack.” I’ve noticed since I was young that people associate sex with disintegrity. It’s a sort of, like, arrested development that people never get through. And I’d like to even connect it to a certain notion, a false one, that […]

Blut

Arnica, eyebright, thedraft from the well with thestar-die on top Mist clung to the crooked eaves of Freiburg’s gabled roofs like damp lace unpicked from the hem of night, and beyond the last slate chimney the Black Forest gathered itself into rolling, darkened crests—an ocean of fir whose silence was as deliberate as a held […]

George Washington

Thinking of George Washington Here he makes sense, he embodies a rare historical moment in which speculation and restraint were held together rather than opposed. Washington was not a speculative philosopher in the academic sense, but he had a profound instinct for the dangers of bureaucratic self-justification. He distrusted standing armies, permanent offices, and centralized […]

Corinthians 12

Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord⁠, but by the Holy Ghost⁠. Now there are diversities of gifts⁠, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And […]

Jaan

ژزر The obset is anger: not an outburst, but the affect of being up-set by the obsent, by something that should be present yet governs from absence. Anger names the body’s registration of an umbra that refuses to resolve, a shadow with agency. 1894 Calcutta, India Bose is trained in mathematics and theoretical physics at […]

Sleep

polymorphia George Snell’s work established that transplantation success or failure is not primarily a surgical problem but an informational one, governed by inherited markers that tell the immune system what counts as “self” and what must be rejected. Through painstaking mouse-breeding experiments, Snell mapped what became known as the major histocompatibility complex, showing that graft […]

Right

autonomy does not reliably flourish simply because the formal conditions for it once existed. It is entirely possible—indeed observable—that when the domain of right becomes incoherent, politicized, or purely instrumental, individuals lose not only trust in law but confidence in their own capacity for self-legislation. an educated capacity to name remote abstractions without agency, paired […]