Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is almost synonymous with German humanism. In the late eighteenth century, Goethe was not only a writer. He was also a state official in the Duchy of Saxe - Weimar - Eisenach , legally trained, institutionally empowered, and administratively responsible. One capital case confirmed under this administrative order would later become the basis of Viktor Glass’s documentary novel Goethes Hinrichtung . Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Goethes-Hinrichtung

This article is the second part of a three-part series on Daoism, Stoicism, and their comparative relevance for modern societies. While the first article  examined Daoism as a civilizational ethics of restraint against domination and ecological excess, this study focuses on Stoicism as a Western ethical response to systemic crisis under empire. Stoicism did not emerge as a philosophy of political reform or institutional redesign. It arose as an ethics of endurance in a world

This article examines the pivotal role of Roger Bacon in the transformation of Western epistemology from medieval scholasticism  to the foundations of modern scientific and mechanistic thought. It argues that Bacon’s elevation of experiment and mathematics as epistemic authorities initiated a structural division between reason and experience that later emerged philosophically as the distinction  between a priori and a posteriori knowledge in Kant. The study explains Aristotle

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I used to travel to Sudan from time to time for certain business projects. It never occurred to me how eye-opening what I would see and experience in an underdeveloped country like Sudan could be. When I first landed in Sudan, the airport was covered everywhere with advertising posters of world-famous hotels. Familiar logos, familiar names. Yet the airport itself was terrible, with cats roaming all over the place. The cats were of a kind I h

This article is the first part of a three-part series on Daoism, Stoicism, and their comparative relevance for modern societies. The present study focuses exclusively on Daoism as a civilizational response to systemic crisis. The second article will examine Stoicism as a parallel Western ethics of endurance under imperial power. The third will offer a systematic philosophical comparison of these two traditions in relation to contemporary capitalism, artificial intelligence, a

For over four centuries, the Ottoman Empire governed  population movement as a routine component of administrative order. Warfare, fiscal extraction, frontier security, environmental pressures, and centralized planning continuously displaced and recombined populations  across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Black Sea steppe, and the Caucasus. In this context, mobility functioned not as an exceptional disruption but as a regular instrument of imperial governance . Through sustained

Strategic uncertainty has become the baseline condition under which global politics and economics operate. Power is more dispersed, trust more fragile and stability more conditional than at any time since the end of the Cold War. This landscape begins with the structure of power. The international system has not settled into a stable multipolar balance, but into a form of strategic multipolarity defined by fluid alignments. The US–China rivalry remains central, yet it no long

China did not enter the 21st century as a newcomer to science and technology. It returned. China’s present confrontation with the West over semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and digital sovereignty is not simply a rivalry between latecomer and incumbent. It reflects  a much longer civilizational history  of technical power, institutional coordination, and state-directed knowledge production . No Western thinker did more to restore this depth of memory, and no one unset