Tag: Science
The plague and the simulacra of social control in Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura"
In "De Rerum Natura", written during the republican era and rediscovered only in the fifteenth century, Lucretius stages the description of the Athens plague of 430 BC: the picture is deliberately bleak and bears the mythical features of the space-time indefiniteness that characterizes the crepuscular epochs. Once the subjects and the space-time horizons have definitively fallen, what remains is a gloomy picture of death with spectacular and macabre shapes, which the author nevertheless uses to convey an ethical criticism, making use of a solemnly rich lexicon of archaisms, capable of to probe unexplored places of the human soul and of the word itself.
βAt the wall of timeβ: Ernst JΓΌnger's prophecies about the Age of the Titans
125 years ago, on March 29, 1895, Ernst JΓΌnger, one of the most important and original thinkers of the short century, was born in Heidelberg. Sixty years have passed since the publication of his work "At the wall of time" which, reread today, can only amaze us at the punctuality of the prophecies it contains about the world to come, the world in which we find ourselves living today: from the figure paradigmatic of the "unknown soldier" to the advent of the so-called "mass-man", passing through the phenomenon of the "disappearance of borders" and finally coming to highlight the work of destruction of the natural rhythms in which man has always been inserted, accomplished by means of the "titanism" of Science.
Jacques Bergier and "Magic Realism": a new paradigm for the atomic age
Recently translated into Italian by the types of Il Palindromo, "In praise of the Fantastic" by the French writer and journalist Jacques Bergier, best known for having written with Louis Pauwels "The morning of the wizards", provides an analysis of the work of some "magic writers" at the time unknown to the French-speaking public (including Tolkien, Machen and Stanislav Lem), aimed at defining a new paradigm for the XNUMXst century that can combine science and science fiction with the ontological category of the "sacred".
Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India: The Insights of Brahmagupta and BhΔskara AcΔrya
Centuries before Galileo and Newton some Indian scholars such as Brahmagupta and BhΔskara AcΔrya, heirs of the millenary knowledge of the Vedas,Β they had already theorized the heliocentric model and the force of gravity; and again, calculus, second degree equations and the number zero.
Arthur Machen and the awakening of the Great God Pan
The recent reprint of Arthur Machen's "folk horror" masterpiece allows us to shed light on one of the most fascinating phenomena of "pagan rebirth" in the modern West: the awakening of the Great God Pan in Victorian England, at the turn of the 800th century. and the '900.
Luitzen EJ Brouwer: when Mathematics meets Mysticism
The most advanced physics now gives reason to 'heretical' scientists like Brouwer, who in his work tried to reconcile mathematics and mysticism, leading him to perspectives that are nothing short of unusual, albeit influenced by the Pythagorean School of ancient Hellas and by oriental mystics.
HP Lovecraft, the "doors of perception" and the "cracks in the Great Wall"
How HPL analyzed in his literary productionΒ - and especially in "From Beyond" (1920)Β - the emergence of the irrational in the age of science and machines and anticipated the "psychedelic" suggestions on the pineal gland
