The 3 best books by Antonio Escohotado

If it could be said that there were still philosophers in the XNUMXst century, it was thanks to a Antonio Escohotado bent on both theorizing and pulling a metaphysical empiricism via introspection to the depths. Yes, also drugs through. Everything to achieve that kaleidoscopic lucidity so typical of the psychedelic seventies, from where to extract synthesis with airs of truth for a world in shadows.

It is not that great references of that last great philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as himself Nietzsche, did not resort to the alteration or depersonalization of certain psychoactive stimulants. The question in Antonio is experience as a vital exercise. With each new trip one can bring new impressions about any aspect of humanity.

You can even talk about the media themselves, about those drugs that alter and modify the perspective of everything, with their inherent risks. But like any good creative spirit, Antonio Escohotado was much more than the particularities for which he became known in an Ibiza made a beacon of alternative life thanks to him. And so later came, in new phases and times, sociological or economic essays. To the point of making his signature a reference for almost any field of recent thought.

Top 3 recommended books by Antonio Escohotado

Elementary history of drugs

Nothing new under the sun. Drugs are not patents and cutting edge exclusivity whatsoever. The human being has resorted to drugs, beyond as pain therapies, in countless times and places. Antonio Escohotado gives us that "trip" through a story half taboo half esotericism.

"Elementary history of drugs" proposes a documented and entertaining historical journey through the evolution of the various types of drugs and their uses, from religious rites to access the truth revealed in certain societies to the invasion of crack and designer drugs , from the opium wars to the outbreak of the psychedelia.

This synthesis of the monumental General History of Drugs analyzes the evolution of attitudes towards drugs throughout history; its use for religious, therapeutic or merely hedonistic purposes; the reaction of the State and the problems that prohibition, anatemization and police persecution entail… The work provides an enormous amount of information and proposes an approach to the universe of drugs that avoids clichés, trivializations and simplistic visions.

Escohotado affirms in the prologue that «although until recently it was a field reserved for journalistic sensationalism, or abstruse toxicology manuals, the particular history of drugs illuminates the general history of humanity with its own light, as when we opened a window until then closed to the horizon and the same things appear under a new perspective.

Elementary history of drugs

Reality and substance

Escohotado's most entirely philosophical work. An approach to essential thinking about truths, realities and our condemnation to the entirely subjective perception of everything around us. With the counterweight of a reason determined to make impressions incontestable truths, regardless of instincts that can point to other things in more intelligent species in this sense ...

Doing philosophy first can be defined as the act of giving concept to a few words, whose content in each time indicates the understanding that man has of what he is. Nothing, being, essence, reason, matter, form, space, time, cause, accident, necessity ... so opaque and transparent at the same time, so generous and so sparing, they offer the sense that stops to penetrate them a vision of its own about the real.

This treatise on metaphysics restores the temple of ancient knowledge to rethink them from the present, with special attention to specifying the notions of reality and substance. Whoever travels the arid adventure of ontological knowledge does not find the end of the promised land, although with an orientation adapted to territories without a map. Without a compass other than inverting Hegelian logic -returning from the subject to the object, from the Idea to Nature-, tracing the genesis of a being that is doing is mapping self-movement to its core, introducing the concept of spirit in philosophical discourse. .

Reality and substance

Harlots and wives

The essays handle ideas, the novels characters. Myths describe moods, recurring feelings in life. In contrast to prose that dispenses with images and music, mythical discourse tells our story from the history of others, with a procedure similar to the game of Russian dolls.

Own and others, inside and outside, yesterday and tomorrow thus lose their mutual strangeness: the particularity of each case also expresses something constant and general. The following pages recall four legends that could be said eight, since the myths of Ishtar, Hera, Deyanira and Maria are also those of Gilgamesh, Zeus, Hercules and Joseph. Successive in time, Mediterranean in the broad sense, they illuminate different ways of assuming the "male" destiny and the "female" destiny. It might be added that they expose stages of a long war, full of misunderstandings, with reasons and clauses for amusing armistices.

Harlots and wives

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