Eric Gans's weekly column on culture, desire, and the originary hypothesis — published every week from 1996 to 2019. An essential running commentary on contemporary thought through the lens of Generative Anthropology.
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Before the recent presidential election, I contemplated writing a Chronicle assessing the candidates, but there never seemed to be a clear role for GA in making such an assessment. And whatever my...
This Chronicle was inspired by John Haught’s Is Nature Enough? (Cambridge UP, 2006—recommended to me by Andrew Bartlett). Haught’s variant of “process theology” is the first defense of belief...
Although language and the other forms of human representation are now recognized as unique in the animal kingdom, exploration of the specifically anthropological ontology characteristic of the...
How does Heidegger come to speak of Being? “Being” is in the first place a word, an element of language that cannot be understood before one understands what language is. But what does it mean to...
Because its hypothesis is conceived as a minimal object of belief, GA is in principle an optimal meeting place for believers and unbelievers. The postmodern era has been dominated by assertions of...
The following is the text of a lecture delivered at the University of Western Sydney (Bankstown) on Friday, November 7, 2008. When I received an invitation to lecture in Australia, I expected to...
In Chronicle 361 , which opposed theistic optimism to atheistic pessimism, I wondered both whether optimistic atheism was possible and if it was, to what extent it corresponded to GA. This...
I have referred many times to transcendence in recent Chronicles without making explicit exactly what I mean by it. Transcendence is a charged term, with religious connotations or at least...
The expression qui perd gagne (“he who loses, wins”) provides the central theme of Sartre’s three-volume psychobiography of Gustave Flaubert, the “family idiot” who became the most important French...
This is the slightly revised text of a lecture delivered at the University of Sydney in November: The Enlightenment attempted to comprehend human institutions, from language to political forms, in...
Ten years ago, I wrote a Chronicle about being turned down for a promotion at UCLA I thought I had every reason to expect. Ten years later, this promotion (to the obscurely honorific title of...
We necessarily think in propositions and for this reason cannot escape the metaphysical, which is merely a synonym for the transcendental; a declarative sentence creates a “fictional” reality “next...
I am currently in the preliminary stages of a project that will address the question raised by the current wave of anti-religion books and the replies they have received from the faithful. Now that...
Although the members of every racial/ethnic/sexual minority belong in the first place to “the human race,” in today’s era of identity politics, affirmations of universal humanity are viewed with...