CRAIG A. PHILLIPS, PH.D.
Snowbound! Check out this post on my free Substack page.
A Nor’easter is tracking up the Eastern Seaboard this morning, and the snow-covered birch trees outside my window in New Hampshire sent me back to John Greenleaf Whittier’s great 1866 poem ‘Snow-Bound’, and to the question of what we lose when no storm can truly cut us off anymore. Modern life is specifically engineered to prevent the conditions that produced some of the best writing in American literature.
This week my reading moved from a 1677 woodcut map of New England to a 1606 copper engraved map of the religions of the world, to a seventeenth-century catalogue of world religions and Christian heresies, to a sprawling space opera set across the solar system. A rare book arrived in the mail, a public talk prompted uncomfortable questions, and the common thread running through all of it turned out to be the same: people trying to draw the world as they wished it to be, and the significant silences their clean lines depend on.
Check out the new post on my free Substack page!
https://craigphillips.substack.com/p/maps-space-battles-and-old-heresies
Check out a new post on my free Substack page.
What does it mean to read philosophy for its own sake, without lecture notes or citations? A detour into classical Indian thought shows how Hindu and Buddhist philosophers debated the nature of the self—and whether there even is one to find.
https://craigphillips.substack.com/p/returning-to-indian-philosophy
IN THESE TIMES 