Philosophy Archives - Page 5 of 20

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...

Gender

What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

October 11, 2022 • by Skye C. Cleary and Luis Jaramillo

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

Religion

Why Christianity and the Fate of American Democracy Are Intertwined

An interview with intellectual historian David Hollinger

September 26, 2022 • by Claire Potter and David A. Hollinger

We're now confronted with a remarkable paradox. Our increasingly secular society is saddled with increasingly religious politics. Religion is ever-more prominent in Supreme Court decisions and in the statements that candidates for political office make. Politics are not only more religious, they are more Christian. ...

Why Christianity and the Fate of American Democracy Are Intertwined

New York City

Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?

August 31, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Harvey Weinstein—like Jeffrey Epstein—was the product not of a liberated sexuality gone haywire but of a liberated sexuality that passed them by when it mattered most. ...

Philosophy

When I Was One-Dimensional

How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life

July 20, 2022 • by James Miller

"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...

Philosophy

Identity Politics and Culture Wars

Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald join moderator Simon Critchley in the 2021 Holberg Debate

July 18, 2022 • by Judith Butler, Glenn Greenwald, Simon Critchley and Cornel West

To some, identity-based politics has been embraced as an effective strategy to combat discrimination and marginalization. To others, it may seem that identity politics has resulted in culture wars involving violent conflicts and a destructive exchange of labels. ...

Philosophy

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

June 6, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

The philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was an impossibly difficult man who strived to unite the impossible to unite. Taubes, a philosopher of religion and politics, spent his life straining to unite Saint Paul, Jacob Frank, and Sabbatai Sevi in an antinomian and chiliastic mix. His ultimate aims were the overcoming ...

Religion

Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology

The challenge of hosting the divine

May 20, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

Greek epic and tragedy abound in cautionary tales about people who violated the basic rules of hospitality to guests and strangers and then paid the price, even when the visitors were not gods but merely human strangers. ...

Gods as Difficult Guests in Greek and Indian Mythology

Philosophy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

February 22, 2022 • by Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Democracy

The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change

In an excerpt from Rethinking American Grand Strategy, Beverly Gage examines how statecraft and social movements intersect

December 8, 2021 • by Beverly Gage

Means and Ends As other essays in this collection demonstrate, the idea of “grand strategy” emerged out of the world of military affairs. Under the famous rubric identified by British historian B. H. Liddell Hart, “strategy” was what generals did, while “grand strategy” fell to politicians and statesmen, charged not only with winning ...

The Blob and the Mob: On Grand Strategy and Social Change

Democracy

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

The two historians talk to Public Seminar about Rethinking American Grand Strategy

December 8, 2021 • by Gregory Coleman, Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Award-winning historians Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston spoke (virtually) with Public Seminar editorial intern Gregory Coleman to discuss their new book Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021). Edited by Nichols and Preston with fellow historian Elizabeth Borgwardt, the collection of curated essays discusses what American grand strategy ...

Navigating the World of Grand Strategy with Christopher McKnight Nichols and Andrew Preston

Philosophy

A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek

Why only a super-anthropocentrism and the reading of Hegel can save us

October 20, 2021 • by Leonardo Caffo and Slavoj Zizek

The following interview between Slavoj Žižek and Leonardo Caffo was recently published in the Italian magazine Sette—the weekly supplement of the daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera. It has been translated for Public Seminar by Thomas Winn. Slavoj Žižek is one of a few living philosophers whose ideas have been translated into ...