ABSTRACT
Philosophy as a word and as an undertaking was established by Plato, in an effort to counter the activities of the sophists who were threatening to take over the thinking of contemporary Athens, and Greek culture. This chapter will argue, in the footsteps of ideas by Michel Foucault and Eric Voegelin, that modern philosophy, through the misguided ‘rationalism’ of Descartes, Kant, and their followers, became nothing else but a version of sophistry, a modern version of Gnosticism, or a promotion of trickster thinking. This reading of rationalism will combined, through the ideas of Gell, Yates, and Horvath, with a presentation the modern technological mindset as a version of alchemic thinking, or a form of magic: a destructive and transformative mode of thinking that is searching for immediate results, and for this is capable to turn the world around its corners, with the help of its two key tools, mediation and consciousness. The chapter will analyse as a key example for trickster thinking the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the anarchist turned communist who wrote illegible books and was wrong in every one of his political moves, but is still considered as a top intellectual of the past century.
