Cairnbuilder
(Imaginative Philosophy Blog)
A cairn is a manmade pile of stones often used as a simple trail marker in open terrain. An inukshuk, for example, is a cairn.
This blog is the author’s own cairn-building: small pathmarks left along the way of thinking. Each post is an essay in the original sense — a loose, exploratory attempt to put thought into writing, with no greater aim than self-expression.
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A Case for Socrates After Nietzsche
For Friedrich Nietzsche, Socrates represents a decisive turning point in Western history: the triumph of dialectic, rationalization, and moralization over the tragic wisdom of the Greeks. In Nietzsche’s…
4 min read
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The Ocean that Leaps: Being in Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Heidegger
Nietzsche: Time is a storm of living forces, each crest a fleeting fiction of power that believes itself whole as it leaps. Leibniz: Every leap is a world…
4 min read
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Nietzsche as Affective Phenomenologist
This essay proposes a reading of Nietzsche that begins not with his genealogies, his social histories of morality, or his psychological speculations about the subconscious, but rather with…
4 min read
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Kant’s Imagination as Proto-Dasein (WIP)
A Precursor to Ontological Difference Often dismissed as the most disappointing episode in Kant’s philosophy, the doctrine of imagination is in fact the hinge of the entire Post-Kantian…
4 min read
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Being, Becoming, and the End of Metaphysics: Nietzsche and Heidegger in Dialogue
This brief piece aims to isolate the central point of contention between Nietzsche and Heidegger, two thinkers unmistakably shaped by the Post-Kantian transformation of philosophy. Both seek to…
4 min read
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Language as First Religion
Language is our first religion. Before temples, before priesthoods, before doctrine hardened into creed, human beings gathered around (and were gathered by) words. Language formed the earliest covenant…
4 min read
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