The Immanence of Malady: On the Concept of Pathic Temporality in the Thought of Marcel Hénaff Among the marginal figures of late 20th-century French philosophy, Marcel Hénaff (1942–2018) occupies an intriguing, though often overlooked, position at the interstice of anthropology, phenomenology, and political philosophy. While his work is more frequently cited in cultural studies and…
Category: Philosophy notebooks
Articles about real philosophers by Martijn Benders
A collection of essays that pry open the lesser-known vaults of philosophy with a poet’s crowbar. In these pieces, Benders explores the fringe, forgotten, or deliberately misunderstood thinkers of history—not to worship them, but to provoke them into saying something new. Expect seriousness with a smirk, erudition with bite.
Philosophy Notebooks
For those who dare to think in margins and metaphysics. These notebooks are not for grocery lists or polite affirmations—they’re for your deepest doubts, half-born systems, and late-night epiphanies that smell faintly of despair and genius. Whether you’re unraveling Zeno or reconfiguring Kant on the back of a tram ticket, these pages are your battlefield.
Ideal for: heretics, metaphysicians, ontological insomniacs, and anyone who’s ever argued with a tree.
Franz Heinrich Raab and the Paradox of Inverse Light
The Discordance of the Lumen: An Unexplored Nuance in the Noölogy of Franz Heinrich Raab In the vast and gently ridiculed peripheries of philosophical inquiry dwell certain names that, like will-o’-the-wisps, flicker with maddening obscurity yet intense inner illumination. Among these spectral luminaries is Franz Heinrich Raab (1749–1821), an enigmatic German polymath whose work, “Traktat…
Eriugena’s Logoi: Semiotic Rupture in Divine Creation
The Semiotic Transgression in the Cosmogony of Johannes Scotus Eriugena In revisiting the magnificent yet often obscured legacy of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, one confronts not merely the convergence of Greek and Christian disputation but a singular instance of metaphysical semiotics that reputedly eluded both his contemporaries and most modern exegetes. Among the manifold intricacies of…
Franz von Baader and the Mystery of the Primordial Mirror
The Concentric Ontology of Franz von Baader: A Re-examination of the ‘Primordial Mirror’ Concept In traversing the arcana of continental philosophy, there exists a region of thought suffused with luminescence and darkness alike, home not to the frequently cited names of academic record, but to those whose ruminations remain dwelling on the edges of intelligibility…
Ernst von Baader and the Metaphysics of the Vocative
The Vocative Nothingness: Ernst von Baader’s Theosophical Lexicon and the Impossibility of Pure Being Among the lesser-frequented provincial corridors of German speculative theology stands the singular figure of Ernst von Baader (1765–1841), distinguished by his unyielding resistance to modernity’s march and by his spirited attempt to reconcile mystico-theosophical currents with the dialectic tradition inherited from…
Franz von Baader and the Metaphysics of Regressive Will
On the Shadows of Volition: The Regressive Teleology in the Philosophy of Franz Xaver von Baader In the obscure recesses of German Idealism resides the deeply mystical and oft-neglected figure of Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841), a thinker whose minerological studies curiously dovetailed with a theological mysticism, producing a system of thought at once rooted…
Max Stirner and the Metaphysics of the Spook
The Shadow of the Absolute: Max Stirner’s Concept of the ‘Spook’ as Proto-Metaphysical Critique In the dusky corridors of 19th-century continental thought, amidst the ringing of Hegelian dialectics and the nascent murmurs of Nietzschean thunder, there emerges a solitary and spectral figure—Johann Kaspar Schmidt, more notoriously known by his pseudonym, Max Stirner. Anarchist, egoist, or…
Cosmas Indicopleustes and the Ontology of Sacred Blueprint
The Precosmic Hypostasis in Cosmas Indicopleustes: A Study in Vicariant Ontologies In the murmuring epochs preceding the formal sedimentation of scholastic metaphysics, where the crystalline dogmata of Aristotelian logic had not yet fully interlaced with the ecclesiastical corpus, there emerges the strange and dazzling figure of Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Alexandrian geographer whose idiosyncratic Christian…
Hamann’s Nocturnal Logos: Language as Divine Ontology
The Ontological Subtlety of Johann Georg Hamann’s “Nocturnal Speech”: Providence as Linguistic Urgrund In the cacophonous chorus of Enlightenment rationalism, the voice of Johann Georg Hamann resounds like the whisper of a ghost — elusive and tremulous, yet saturated with primordial significance. His name, nearly effaced from the stained vellum of canonical philosophy, deserves a…
Dianoetic Neutrality and the Ungrund in Jakob Böhme
On the Dianoetic Neutrality of Being in Jakob Böhme’s Ungrund In the fevered twilight of metaphysical speculation, amidst the stately cathedrals of dialectical idealism and the crumbling cloisters of scholastic realism, one seldom darkens the threshold of the cobbler-prophet from Görlitz, the theosophist Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Revered by a rare few and dismissed by the…
Hamann’s Recursive Linguistic Ontology and the Incarnate Logos
The Recursive Paradox of Johann Georg Hamann’s Linguistic Ontology In the vast, neglected corridors of Enlightenment counter-thought, there echoes the obscure but endlessly resonant voice of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), that thorn in the side of rationalist orthodoxy. Overshadowed by his cosmopolitan friend Kant and long dismissed as the “Magus of the North” whose gnomic…
Fechner’s Ontological Hesitation: Toward a Poetic Panpsychism
The Ontological Hesitation in Gustav Fechner’s Psychophysical Cosmology In the baroque architecture of nineteenth-century metaphysical speculation, few edifices appear as strangely configured and little trodden as the system of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), whose psychophysical panentheism occupies an enigmatic intermediate zone between natural science and speculative philosophy. Though occasionally remembered as a precursor to empirical…