Man’s Duty to Society
From Meingast’s notebook circa 1880: “For many a man, the totality of social connexions is at bottom nothing but a grumpily dignified scheme—a dull procession t...
Category: Translations
The Mark of the Mental
In a characteristically brisk manner, Brentano has postulated a single mark defining all things Mind, and has identified that mark as Intentionality, the direct...
Love and Repetition
If you repeat anything for long enough, you will be brought to love the activity or the object (if the activity is one best characterized by a transitive verb)....
On Mirrors
A man is lucky if he sees his own reflection in a mirror, for usually he sees only a reflection of his own reflection. (Prolegomena to Infinite Mirror Realism) ...
On America
You play with ace and diamond, bat and ball, horse and track, gun and fowl, but, frolicsome Americans, is there not a finer game to be played? You exalt ...
Meingast on Vacation
All this (I sweep my hands out in front of me) that I ostend, these Prussian meadows with their red poppies, with their pale caducous calyxes, the black firs ru...
Curious Anomaly in the Structure of Self-Rationality
When I feel my beard flapping about in the wind, nothing could convince me that it is not my own beard but rather the beard of some other fellow that I feel fla...
The Elixir of Sunbeams
An entry on Meingast was written for the 1923 edition of the Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie (Schwabe & Co Verlag), but Meingast’s attorney wr...
The Eternal Recurrence of the Slightly Different
Although highly influenced by Nietzsche, Meingast departed from Nietzsche on several key points. One crucial point of contention concerns Nietzsche’s idea...
On Transcendental Arguments
“The fate of all transcendental arguments is abject failure. This is because the world is made possible by the individual himself. When one reflects, one ...
On Hospitality (from the Guide to the “Good” Life)
To roast the suckling pig alone, stoking the fire with an iron recast from discarded, dull and dented tools, is the nadir of one’s life. But to roast it w...
Meingast’s Guide to the “Good” Life
From Guide to the “Good” Life (1926): It’s common Austrian wisdom that the more one reads and thinks, the sicker and uglier the body becomes. ...
Poem: “Towards the city centre to Gaudenzdorf”
This short poem was composed after Meingast rode the new steam tram in Vienna in 1887: Too close and too many and there is no near handle/and we know all of it ...
Hallowed Hollowness II
“Gentlemen! We find ourselves in a crucial epoch. We, so called ‘civilized’ men of intellect, are only now emerging from a primitive phase in which ...
On Practical Reasoning
From Insouciance in Deliberation (1899): To really deliberate, that is, to vividly imagine oneself persisting into one future, adjusting that mysterious stew o...
Hallowed Hollowness
From “Hallowed Hollowness: On Machines and Modernity”: “The modern man of science wonders to himself, “If I were to arrange things thus-...
On the Aim of Reason
“Knowledge, for Reason, is but a passing stage. Once, through its effortful striving, it has reached knowledge of the world entire, Reason coagulates into...
Meingast’s poem for children
Exciting news, all! I’ve located a manuscript of Meingast’s 1903 poem for children, “Entartete Entenarten.” It’s in a library in L...
On Love
“One plus one will never be one. Only and forever two. But that does not diminish anything: a current only passes when there is a difference in charge....
On Intuition
“There are hordes of people today who would like us to believe that in their wisest moments they were doing their thinking with the help of some special f...