The ‘New Nirvana Song’ Unwittingly Refutes Materialism

by John Ellis “Computers are bad phenomenologists.” Sarah Bakewell[1] Formalism was always doomed. Intriguing as a theory, its very existence disproves itself. As Wayne Booth commented in his introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin’s masterful Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “Everyone who has pronounced thus boldly for a purified form has been confronted with the scandalous fact that … Continue reading The ‘New Nirvana Song’ Unwittingly Refutes Materialism

The Anti-Gospel of ‘The Matrix’

by John Ellis In the spring of 1999, while sitting in Greenville, SC’s now extinct Haywood Road Cinemas, I contemplated the meaning of the red pill and the blue pill. In the weeks and months to follow, The Matrix’s philosophical puzzles posed interesting avenues that my burgeoning atheism was happy to travail. Vague and sophomoric … Continue reading The Anti-Gospel of ‘The Matrix’