Philosophy
Story Stream
Paul Ricoeur and the Crisis of Atheism April 09, 2025
Twentieth-century French philosophy continues to inflame the passions of American readers in the 21st. While Anglo-American philosophy can seem impossibly dry and technical, the great French masters still speak to our most urgent concerns. What they ...
A Question Well-Posed April 04, 2025
Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that we can never be reminded too often that a man existed named Socrates. Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates thus comes as a particularly timely reminder. Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, ...
Transcending the Glass Ceiling April 03, 2025
However much we steel ourselves against it, the arrogant and dismissive attitude of 19th-century men toward their female contemporaries can still sting. “What then shall the woman of genius do; what can she do, and be woman still?” asked a writer in...
The Necessity of Nussbaum March 11, 2025
I first encountered Martha C Nussbaum in 1987. She was a guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers. In each programme, Magee would interview a leading contemporary philosopher about the ideas of a great philosopher of the pa...
Cinematheque: Seeing and Being March 04, 2025
Is Being fundamentally a state, or an act? Is humanhood something we are, or that we do? For Heidegger, we only exist as relational creatures, embedded in a web of connections, and it is through our attempt to comprehend the nature of those relations...
The Winter of Civilization March 03, 2025
I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout S...
What Socrates Teaches Us February 05, 2025
Who was Socrates? Everyone has heard his name, and most people are aware of the basics: He lived thousands of years ago in Athens, Greece, and is somehow the father of Western philosophy, though exactly how is a mystery....
The Art of Reading Like a Translator February 03, 2025
By just about any measure, Damion Searls, an American translator of German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, is one of the leading practitioners of his art. He has translated the works of widely acknowledged masters (Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke), ...
The Torture of an Unphilosophical Life December 27, 2024
Even if you haven’t read Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, you probably agree that it has a great title. ...
A Space Novel for Earth Lovers December 17, 2024
I’ve never been a space guy. Earth, like Robert Frost said, seems to be “the right place for love.” While I appreciate the ambition of those of us who want to travel to Mars, I’m not attracted to the idea because I’m not desperately in love with the ...
Canceled for Telling the Truth About Sex December 10, 2024
Iam in my final year as an undergraduate student in philosophy at the University of Leeds. I am a gender-critical feminist—that is, I believe that women are adult human females, and that this is the basis of their oppression. I do not believe in the ...
Education Upstarts Hold Lack of Civics To Be Self-Evident December 04, 2024
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – As the autumn sun warms the historic campus outside, a professor specializing in ancient and modern political philosophy guides undergraduate students through the seemingly ruthless nuances of Machiavelli’s 16th-century philosophy...
The Nature of all Homecomings November 26, 2024
It was the evening after Election Day and I was speed-walking—while sedated— through JFK to catch a plane to San Francisco. Speedwalking while sedated is comically disorienting; I felt like one of those cartoon characters whose bottom half is a spinn...
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in America November 22, 2024
One day in the early 2000s, a goth teenager by the name of Sohrab Ahmari was perusing the shelves of a Salt Lake City bookstore when his gaze landed upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For a misfit atheist adolescent looking for meanin...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
On Classical Education November 14, 2024
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? And what has the Department of Education to do with the classical education movement? For Tertullian, the second-century church father, the question was whether Hellenic culture and philosophy might divert Christ...
From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series November 12, 2024
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Ba...
Lost in the Forest of Symbols October 30, 2024
AMONG A SMALL BUT VOCAL SUBSET of readers, the arrival of a new doorstopper on poetry and philosophy by Canadian thinker Charles Taylor is liable to induce swooning.For at least fifteen years, other thinkers have been describing him as an “elder stat...
Who the Woke Are October 28, 2024
What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But ...
A Principled Revolution October 23, 2024
Paul Seaton is a patient, methodical, and incredibly enlightening political thinker. By day, he teaches Catholic seminarians metaphysics, philosophy, and political thought, cutting against the braindead soft progressivism that has too often undermine...
Escaping the Mind Machine October 17, 2024
In 1714, the German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, wrote in The Monadology, “If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could ente...
We’ve Entered a New World War October 15, 2024
PARIS — Bernard-Henri Lévy has been so famous in France for so long he is known by his own acronym. BHL is a wealthy philosopher, celebrity war reporter, television executive and friend to presidents and movie stars. He is as quintessentially French ...
A Beacon of Hope October 04, 2024
In one of modern philosophy’s most celebrated scuffles, Jean-Paul Sartre derided Albert Camus for rejecting violence committed in service of noble ideals. If you snub your nose at movements that practice armed resistance, Sartre warned, you’ll end up...
Philosophy of the People September 11, 2024
‘As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.’– from ‘Plato; or, the Philosopher’; Repr...
The Enlightenment's Addicts and Fanatics September 11, 2024
David Hume is famous for his seminal contributions to philosophy and economics during the Enlightenment. He may also have been the principal diagnostician of his time. This at least is Richard Whatmore’s contention in The End of Enlightenment: Empire...
