Hello everyone, welcome to this interview of the Lotus Itas, and I'm pleased to be interviewing

again Dr. Benedict Beckhild, the author of Western self-contempt, ecophobia in the decline of civilizations

by Northern Illinois University Press.

And today we're going to talk a bit about something a bit different, but not entirely different.

We're going to talk about multiculturalism and its philosophy, but also how it has been practiced

in the US, but also in Europe.

And I'm sure we'll have a lot of doom and gloom to discuss about the European setting.

But also I would like to ask you about some of the reasons of your current optimism regarding

the United States, or at least that's how I have heard by a mutual friend.

So one question is, what are your late projects now?

What are the projects you're working on lately?

So currently, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me again.

It's a pleasure always to speak.

And my current projects are a book on aesthetics.

It's actually based on a book that I wrote a piece of juvenilia,

if you will, in my early 20s on aesthetics.

And that was because aesthetics was really my first great passion in philosophy.

But now, obviously, many years later, I've developed since then, hopefully anyway.

So now I'm revamping it, additions, deletions, revisions, and so on, making a new work out of it.

And it's basically about the relationship between art and society.

So it's ascetics and political philosophy, if you will, combined what one teaches us about the other.

And that's going to, yeah, that's going to come out soon.

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