From the beginning of the 20th century European humanism took the form of phenomenology, which can be seen as idealism's modern way of resisting analytical philosophy and the accompanying tendency to lower a positive, determined, naturalistic, ceiling over the world, with technological society -- according to this view -- being one of the results. Among phenomenology's accomplishments, as it struggles against what some of its proponents call the "thingification" of the world, can be counted (...) more>>

How did the "I" of common discourse, as it flourished on European soil, come to think of itself as a "subject", complete with an autonomous sphere, and even more as the substance par excellence, more knowable than any other and without which the existence of the world would not itself be knowable? "It's Descartes' fault" would say Kant and Hegel. But the question is more complex than that; even Descartes himself did not talk about a "subject". To trace this obscure family tree, the (...) more>>