Philosophy Archives - Page 5 of 19

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 ...

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 ...

Philosophy

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist

September 14, 2021 • by Laura Nelson

1 Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and public intellectual who died in 2007, is perhaps best known as “the philosopher who predicted Donald Trump.” In Achieving Our Country, a book articulating his reflections on the possibilities and prospects for democracy in the United States, Rorty worried that economic inequality, coupled with ...

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

Interviews

Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault

Even if he did have sex with underage boys in a Tunisian cemetery in the Sixties

April 8, 2021 • by James Miller and Andrés Gómez Bravo

_____ This interview appeared in Spanish in La Tercera, a daily newspaper published in Santiago, Chile. It was prompted by the claims recently made by Guy Sorman on French television and in The Sunday Times that (as the Times’ headline puts it) “FRENCH PHILOSOPHER MICHEL FOUCAULT ‘ABUSED BOYS IN TUNISIA’.” _____ Andrés Gómez ...

Politics

The Neoracists

A new religion is preached across America: It’s nonsense posing as wisdom

March 11, 2021 • by John McWhorter

_____ One can divide antiracism into three waves. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and 1980s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist was a flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that racism is baked into the structure ...

The Left

A Genealogy of White Privilege

An essay on the politics of confession & guilt

March 11, 2021 • by James Miller

_____ How much shame and guilt should a movement for social justice try deliberately to cultivate? In recent years, this question, superficially abstract, has again become personal for me, both in my ongoing involvement in political protest movements, and my job as a teacher, working at an institution devoted to promoting equity, ...

History

Good and Evil

An excerpt from On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt

February 5, 2021 • by Ann Heberlein

_____ Goodness exists, even in the darkest of moments. It is worth remembering this—that the violence and brutality of the war did not only bring out the worst in people. The darkness also inspired goodness, bravery, and responsibility. There are countless examples of people who, often at great risk to themselves ...

Imaginal Politics

The Riot in the Rights

Fascism, freedom and the far-right

January 19, 2021 • by Rose Parfitt

The Trump presidency has been a rocky road for pretty much everyone to the left of Trump himself – and not only in the United States. Nonetheless, the efforts of the President’s supporters, at his command, to ‘stop the steal’ and overturn the election result by force really has taken ...