The Genealogies of Modernity Journal
Authority and Its Counterfeits: A Conversation with D.C. Schindler, Part IV
To dignify means to show something as not being a mere instrument—to show that the dignified thing has a value in itself… There is a connection between dignifying and allowing something to stand forth into the True. This very concrete, aesthetic sense of authority is, I take it, what allows us to think properly—in a free way.
Lucas B. Carroll interviews D. C. Schindler on the crisis of authority
Authority and Its Counterfeits: A Conversation with D.C. Schindler, Part III
The most important role of the authority is, actually, to make truth possible and accessible to everyone. To allow things to stand out not only in their particular usefulness in this or that way, but indeed to show themselves as they are, to allow them to stand forth most fundamentally in their being.
Lucas B. Carroll interviews D. C. Schindler on the crisis of authority
Authority and Its Counterfeits: A Conversation with D.C. Schindler, Part II
You eliminate the symbolic presence of God in the world when you kill the king. Let me be clear that this does not mean that we need to have a king…But what we do need to have is a sense of political authority that includes a metaphysical-theological dimension, and whatever form that might take in the future.
Lucas B. Carroll interviews D. C. Schindler on the crisis of authority
Authority and Its Counterfeits: A Conversation with D.C. Schindler, Part I
[A]uthority is concerned with a sphere of existence that far exceeds the merely pragmatic order. It ultimately includes the order of thought, and, ultimately, the order of being simply.
Lucas B. Carroll interviews D. C. Schindler on the crisis of authority
Virtual Reading Group: “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory”
Genealogies of Modernity hosts a reading group on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
Jacques Maritain on Modernity: Maligning Sovereignty and Salvaging Freedom
Despite claims of working for this moral good or that concept of order, the Personalists observed that political inscriptions of sovereignty often end up as examples of absolute power exercised without accountability. As such, there is no room for singular sovereignty within a philosophy centered on the well-being of persons.
Marty Tomszak on Maritain and sovereignty for our forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker
Virtual Reading Group: The Genealogy of Genealogy
Genealogies of Modernity hosts a reading group on Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm’s The Genealogy of Genealogy
Peter Maurin: Philosopher and Saint Maker
Maurin called socialism the offspring of capitalism. In his eyes, both capitalism and socialism regard money as the basis of reality. But to Peter Maurin, the person was the basis of reality. The development and cultivation of the human spirit—rather than economic development—would create a new society.
James Murphy and Renée Roden on Peter Maurin’s life and philosophy for our forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker
The “Ascension” from Facticity
Heidegger moved on from “facticity”… to the themes of “homecoming” (Heimkunft) in relation to Being, our gentle “releasement” (Galassenheit) and “openness” to all that is, our grateful reception of the “gift” of Being.
Richard Capobianco on the later Heidegger
An Ethics of Gesture in “It Was Just an Accident”
An ethic that is averse to instrumentality animates the thought of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and can be seen in Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, released in 2025.
Kyle Sossamon on an ethics of gesture
Steering Clear of Sycophants: Flatterers and the False Friend of AI
In most areas, Machiavelli and Erasmus disagree, but both adamantly warn princes against flatterers. Though medieval princes are rare in the present, warnings against flatterers may be more widely applicable than ever before because of AI.
Elizabeth Stice on genealogies of flattery
An Interview with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, Part II
There is no fate a human being can face that will render bringing them into the world immoral…. But it can be a moral failure to knowingly bring a child into the world and not be ready to address, in whatever way you can, the challenges they will face.
Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
An Interview with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, Part I
For most of human history, people understood themselves intergenerationally, as having a past and having a future that extended beyond their lives and that they would be directly contributing to bringing about.
Anthony Shoplik interviews Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
The Great Chain of Being, Part I
The chain of being began in ancient philosophy, but it reached its fullest and most systematic expression in medieval Christendom. In the hands of medieval scholastics, the chain of being was personified.
Julia Powell’s genealogy of the Great Chain of Being
The Interaction Problem
Either the mysterious structures underpinning our rationality are arbitrary and misleading, or—somehow—they broadly work… We are forced to wager that there is something somehow connecting our thoughts with reality.
Kit Wilson on science, skepticism, and subjective experience
Our Modern Split Personality Disorder
“As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, then, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself.”
Kit Wilson on science and reality
Worldpicture, Part III: The Cartesian Roots of Quantum Theory and Postmodernism
“We must recognize that the post-Cartesian reductive-materialist frameworks will never be sufficient to support a robust and expansive human flourishing.”
M. G. Scott on re-accessing metastructure
Worldpicture, Part II: The New Quantum Ontology
“The truly strange thing about quantum mechanics is not the content of the theory: it’s the way that quantum mechanics threatens to upend our fundamental relationship to reality itself.”
M. G. Scott on quantum mechanics and truth.
Human Rights and Humanity in “The Phoenician Scheme”
Here in the middle of these muted colors and fantastical plot is an observation straight out of Hannah Arendt.
Elizabeth Stice on philosophy in Wes Anderson
