Tag: philosophy

Phil Eiger Newmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, 2020.

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Friedrich Nietzsche was born this day in 1844 in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, Saxony, in the Kingdom of Prussia. He died in August 25, 1900, in Weimar, Saxony, in the Second German Reich. The outlines of Nietzsche’s life are readily available online.

Nietzsche is one of the most important philosophers of the North American New Right because of his contributions to the philosophy of history, culture, and religion. (more…)

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Savitri Devi was a philosopher, a religious thinker, and a tireless polemicist and activist for the causes of animal rights, European pagan revivalism, Hindu nationalism, German National Socialism, and–after the Second World War–pan-European racial nationalism. She also sought to found a religion, Esoteric Hitlerism, fusing National Socialism with the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola. All told, she was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the 20th century. (more…)

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Also available in audio here:

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, one starts off chained in a cave looking at shadows being cast on a wall. This initial state corresponds to ignorance: taking social convention as reality, rather than examining nature for oneself. It is essentially closed off not just from truth, but from other cultures and their social conventions. Those are just weird foreigners across the Rio Grande or Orontes. Maybe chupacabras or gold-digging ants live there.

One ascends upwards past the people casting shadows on the wall (why do they exist?)[1] to the beautiful yet blinding true realm of forms, and then returns to the cave, possibly to be lynched by the normies if too aggressive in waking them up.

Leo Strauss argues that since Plato, there has not been a generally upward trend in consciousness, even among philosophers. (more…)

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Stephen Paul Foster, one of my favorite contributors to Counter-Currents, died on the evening of Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Stephen’s end came peacefully, surrounded by his family, after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer.

Stephen was born on July 7, 1947, in Waterloo, Iowa. He grew up in the Midwest, mostly Michigan. He received his undergraduate degree from Grand Valley State University, his master’s degrees in both medieval studies and library science from Western Michigan University, and his doctorate in philosophy from St. Louis University. During a gap in his college years, he served with the Peace Corps in Honduras.

After he received his PhD, Stephen worked as a librarian and academic—first in the cataloging department at the University of Arkansas libraries (1988–1990), then at Central Michigan University, where he served as the Director of Library Technical Services, then as the Associate Dean of Libraries (1990–2002). (more…)

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Translations: Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian

Martin Heidegger is one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, both in terms of the depth and originality of his ideas and the breadth of his influence in philosophy, theology, the human sciences, and culture in general.

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in the town of Meßkirch in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He died on May 26, 1976 in Freiburg and was buried in Meßkirch. (more…)

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Francis Parker Yockey was born 109 years ago today, September 18, in Chicago. He died in San Francisco on June 16, 1960, an apparent suicide. Yockey is one of America’s greatest anti-liberal thinkers and an abiding influence on the North American New Right. In honor of his birthday, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the following works on this site.

Published by Counter-Currents:

• The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey
• The Enemy of Europe

We have also published a new Centennial Edition of Yockey’s Imperium to complete this three-volume set of Yockey’s Collected Writings. You can find out more about Imperium here.

By Yockey himself: (more…)

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Western philosophy is almost exclusively a white male affair. Saint Augustine was technically a Berber, but representations show him as pretty white, and in any case, he was more theologian than philosopher. Philosophy in its familiar sense was written by white men for white men. It is the intellectual wing of white supremacy, one of many reasons we owe it reverence. There are now black “philosophers,” of course, but they are largely a joke, intellectually negligible DEI hires to satisfy university quota requirements, like “nigger minstrels” hired to play the banjo at a garden party in England in 1936. I wonder if you can take a guess as to their main topic of research. There are no black philosophers of note, and that is for reasons which ought to be obvious. And, until relatively recently, there were no female philosophers either. However, in the 20th century, as with some London clubs previously exclusively for gentlemen, women began to be allowed in. One such female philosopher was Iris Murdoch. (more…)

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James Williams
A Process Philosophy of Signs
Edinburgh University Press, 2016

The process philosophy of signs offers a novel answer to the long-standing problem “What is a sign?”
—Professor James Williams, A Process Philosophy of Signs.

Everyone knows what a sign is. Even if you were unable to read you would know what a sign is. In its simple sense, a sign is visual and instructive. (more…)

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I am by far the most terrible man who has ever existed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

The English poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelean. It is certainly possible to affiliate oneself with a philosopher or a school of philosophical thought by adopting the name. One can define oneself as a Hegelian or a Marxist, an empiricist or an idealist, a Lutheran Protestant or a Thomist Roman Catholic. These are comprehensible categories, the basic differences between which are easily understood. But what does it mean to be a Nietzschean? In the week which sees the anniversary of Nietzsche’s death in 1900, at his mother’s house, it might be instructive to look at what Nietzscheanism is or might be. (more…)

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It was almost a year after I arrived in the UK when I began to realize that many English words did not mean what I had thought they meant. Until then, I doubt I had seen much difference between love and lust, happiness and stimulation, respect and deference, self-respect and arrogance, truth and useful speech. Nothing in my life in India had prepared me to understand these distinctions. Had someone tried to explain them to me, the distinctions would likely have slipped from my mind within minutes. I might even have dismissed the person as too abstract, too otherworldly. (more…)

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(Part 3 available here)

1. Will To Power

We have already had occasion in previous installments to discuss will to power (Wille zur Macht), one of the most famous concepts associated with Nietzsche. In this essay, we will go into more detail, and discuss Heidegger’s surprising claim that the doctrines of will to power and the “eternal recurrence of the same” are identical. (more…)

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Giovanni Battista Vico was born on this day in 1668 in Naples. Vico was one of the first counter-Enlightenment thinkers and a pioneer of the philosophy of history and culture. Thus Vico is an important inspiration for the New Right. You can learn more about his life, work, and legacy at Counter-Currents.

Works About Vico at Counter-Currents: (more…)

Nietzsche blind to the clearing.

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(Part 2 available here)

1. Nihilism and the Death of God

The preceding installment gave the reader a sketch of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. It is now time to go into more detail. Heidegger argues that there are “three axes” of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the eternal return, the will to power, and the revaluation of all values.^[1] Our discussion will focus upon these but also cover other matters important for understanding Nietzsche. Ultimately, Heidegger will show that all the different “axes” or aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy are interrelated, and that a thorough discussion of any one must lead to the others. (more…)