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  1. On Laws of History, and Other Faustian Fictions: A Fictionalist Interpretation of Spengler's The Decline of the West.Gregory Morgan Swer - 2023 - Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 7 (1):116-139.
    Most interpretations of Oswald Spengler’s _The Decline of the West_ offer a relativist or positivist reading of his philosophy of history, with the latter being the most common. This paper argues that any positivist account of Spengler’s philosophy of history is untenable, and that only a relativist interpretation is plausible. It differs from standard arguments for the relativist interpretation by arguing that Spengler’s philosophy be understood as a form of fictionalism. However, rather than dismissing the positivistic elements of his philosophy (...)
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  • Science Fiction: Science, Vaihinger and Spengler's Fictionalist Philosophy of Science.Gregory Morgan Swer - 2021 - In David Engels, Gerd Morgenthaler & Max Otte (eds.), Oswald Spengler in an Age of Globalisation. Berlin/Lüdinghausen: Manuscriptum. pp. 197-225.
    Oswald Spengler is best known as a philosopher of history. However, one can trace in volume one of his The Decline of the West a sustained consideration of philosophical issues pertaining to the nature and practice of science that I suggest can be considered to be a philosophy of science. Not only has Spengler’s philosophy of science been largely overlooked, so too has its peculiar fictionalist character. By elaborating on the fictionalist character of Spengler’s scientific views I shall consider his (...)
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  • Longing, Dread and Care: Spengler’s Account of the Existential Structure of Human Experience.Gregory Morgan Swer - 2020 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 51 (1):71-87.
    In The Decline of the West Spengler puts forward a type of philosophical anthropology, an account of the structures of human experiential consciousness and a method of “physiognomic” analysis, which I argue has dimensions that can be understood as akin to existential phenomenology. Humanity, for Spengler, is witness to the creative flux of “Becoming” and constructs a world of phenomena bounded by death, underpinned by the two prime feelings of dread and longing and structured by the two forms of Destiny (...)
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  • The Revolt Against Reason: Oswald Spengler and Violence as Cultural Preservative.Gregory Swer - 2019 - Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 4 (1):123-148.
    In The Decline of the West, Spengler argues that cultures have lifecycles. Although he warns that the end of Faustian (western) culture is nigh, Spengler suggests that the death of the culture might be forestalled if a rapprochement can be brought about between the technologized powers of Reason and the remains of cultural life. This portrayal of Reason as a salvific force seems to contradict Spengler’s typical depiction of Reason as a violent anti-cultural force. This paper reconstructs Spengler’s account of (...)
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  • Technology and the End of Western Civilisation: Spengler’s and Heidegger’s Histories of Life/Being.Gregory Morgan Swer - 2019 - Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 19 (1):1-10.
    Spengler’s work is typically represented as speculative philosophy of history. However, I argue that there is good reason to consider much of his thought as preoccupied with existential and phenomenological questions about the nature and ends of human existence, rather than with history per se. In this paper I consider Spengler’s work in comparison with Heidegger’s history of Being and analysis of technological modernity. I argue that Spengler’s considerable proximity to much of Heidegger’s thought compels us to reconsider the nature (...)
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  • From Periodic Decline to Permanent Rebirth: Alexander Raven Thomson on Civilization, Pathology, and Violence.Rory Lawrence Phillips - 2022 - Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 6 (2):37-52.
    Alexander Raven Thomson was a British fascist philosopher, active from 1932 to 1955. I outline Thomson’s Spenglerian views on civilization and decline. I argue that Thomson in his first book is an orthodox Spenglerian who accepts that decline is inevitable and thinks that it is morally required to destroy civilization in its final stages. I argue that this suffers from conceptual issues which may have caused Thomson’s change to a revised form of Spenglerianism, which is more authentically fascist. This authentically (...)
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