How to Swim Against the Stream: On Diogenes
Costica Bradatan considers the lessons of the famous Cynic Diogenes.
Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University in the United States and an honorary research professor of philosophy at University of Queensland in Australia. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, paperback, 2018) and In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Harvard University Press, 2023). His work has been translated into more than 20 languages, including Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Farsi. Bradatan also writes book reviews, essays, and op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, The New Statesman, and other similar venues.
Costica Bradatan considers the lessons of the famous Cynic Diogenes.
Andrei Codrescu, Aurelian Craiutu, and Costica Bradatan discuss what it means to be an American when you were not born one.
The compelling story of four German-language thinkers in the aftermath of World War I.
Costica Bradatan looks back at, and behind, the life and thought of Umberto Eco, who waged a long war against “dietrologia” (“behindology”).
Costica Bradatan contemplates the blind cruelty of power and the gifts of humility.
Costica Bradatan says we need a Sufi master (or Plato) to enlarge our understanding of philosophy.
We fail precisely because we are so afraid of failure.
Failure runs through it all, from Cioran’s “On the Heights of Despair” to “The Trouble with Being Born.”