Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus : Nihilism or Humanism?

Economicism and Nihilism in the Eclipse of Humanism

This article is based on the conviction that the major problems nowadays are not technical, but ethical, and are incumbent on homo qua homo. The origin of these problems is the advancement of economicism as a supreme interpretation of human and social reality, which means the primacy of the “market” and considering human beings in terms of what they have rather than what they are. Economicism e...

Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann’s Californian Exile

“It is a very strange relationship.”1 Writing to his mother in January 1947, when the collaboration with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus was reaching its end, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno would still fi nd their connection impossible to describe. From today’s greater distance we in turn cannot presume to say defi nitively what it is that went on there. Certainly, a novel was written; certainly, a d...

The Stylometric Analysis of Faustus

The electronic corpus used for the Burwick and McKusick study is as follows: the anonymous 1821 Faustus, using the text prepared for the Oxford edition; five other translations of the play, by Germaine de Staël, George Soane, Daniel Boileau (this translation is called “the Boosey translation” in the stylometrics chapter), John Anster and Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, all again from the texts prep...

Logical Nihilism

Madhyamaka is Not Nihilism

Introduction Nāgārjuna (c. 200 CE) is the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, and easily, after the Buddha himself, the most influential philosopher in the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. Despite the great consensus on his philosophical and doctrinal importance, there is little consensus, either in the canonical Buddhist and non-Buddhist literature of India, Tibet and East Asi...