Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Shestov

  • Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man

    Substack latest.

  • Shestov on the Fool

    Lev Shestov (1866-1938), Job's Balances: "The fool said in his heart: There is no God." Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence,…

  • The Apotheosis of Groundlessness

    The above is a literal translation of the title of Lev Shestov's Apofeoz Besphochvennosti (1905). I much prefer it to All Things are Possible. I suppose the business types, worried about sales, had the last word: Apoplexy of What?? I have a couple of substantial entries on Shestov. Lev Shestov on Husserl Lev Shestov's Irrationalist-Existentialist…

  • Czeslaw Milosz on Lev Shestov

    Shestov, or the Purity of Despair

  • Lev Shestov on Edmund Husserl

    In Memory of a Great Philosopher It is just at this point that we find the most enigmatic and significant contribution of Husserl's philosophy. For here the question arises: Why did Husserl demand with such extraordinary insistence that I read Kierkegaard? For Kierkegaard, in contrast to Husserl, sought the truth not in reason but in…

  • Lev Shestov’s Irrationalist-Existentialist Reading of the Fall of Man

    It is important to distinguish between the putative fact of human fallenness and the various theories and doctrines about what this fall consists in and how it came about.  The necessity of this distinction is obvious:  different philosophers and theologians and denominations who accept the Fall have different views about the exact nature of this event or state.…