Philosophy Archives - Page 8 of 19

Sentencing the Present

Critical conversations in a time of crisis

May 7, 2020 • by Jonathon Catlin, Andrew Cole, Benjamin P. Davis, Bonnie Honig, Joy James, Mark Kingwell, Vincent Lloyd, Sarah Schulman, Dara Z. Strolovitch and Enzo Traverso

In light of Marx’s 1843 conception of critical thought, how does your perspective contribute to “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age”? In a time of social breakdown and uncertainty, we find that critique comes almost too easily. Hence we also take inspiration from the historian E. ...

Imaginal Politics

The New York State Fertility Mandate and Compulsory Heterosexuality

But a law expanding the right to reproductive choice is far from universal

May 4, 2020 • by Ellen Yom

While more New Yorkers will now be able to access this costly treatment to grow their families, there are many individuals and couples who are excluded from this new law, including low-income minority women, self-employed individuals, and gay male couples. Additionally, lesbian individuals, to whom the law does apply, need ...

The New York State Fertility Mandate and Compulsory Heterosexuality

Imaginal Politics

We Are Straw Dogs

Reimagining compassion, merit, and Dao in the time of coronavirus

May 2, 2020 • by Austin Burke

I write this with a heavy heart. Amid pervasive confrontation with the floods of data regarding the coronavirus, we each prepare for this abstraction to take more determinate shape in personal encounters—and yet, I was not prepared for my friend, a veteran of the Stonewall riots and a decades-long survivor ...

Public Health

A Spiritual Month in the Cloud

Virtual Seder, makeshift matzoh, and finding joy amidst grief

May 1, 2020 • by Carol Edelstein

The Cloud this April hums with virtual Seders, virtual Easters, virtual gatherings for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Jews world over subtract from their full glass of wine the ritual drops signifying the ten plagues suffered by the Egyptians when they would not release us from servitude. Dom: water becomes blood Tzfardeyah: frogs overrun ...

Public Health

The Rebirth of Tragedy

We are all existentialists now, knowing only that we must try to carry on

April 28, 2020 • by Arthur Goldhammer

Today we find ourselves in the midst of another great calamity. Once again we are compelled to ask whether our rational faculties are capable of coping with a virus about which we know far too little. The measures we think we need to take to keep untold numbers from dying are themselves so painful ...

Interviews

When Anthropology Overturned a Way of Seeing the World

An interview with Charles King

April 24, 2020 • by Charles King and Zach Schwab

Zach Schwab [ZS]: In the Acknowledgements section of this book you attribute the original inspiration behind it to a series of conversations that you had with your wife. I was wondering if you could elaborate on how that took place, and maybe the moment when you first realized that this ...

When Anthropology Overturned a Way of Seeing the World

Public Health

What Thucydides Can Teach Us

Ancient reflections on a time of plague

April 20, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

Coronavirus will end the Trump presidency – or it will boost his chances of reelection. COVID-19 will provoke a revolution – or it will restore trust in liberal democratic institutions. It will make us more distant – or it will bring us closer together. Thucydides, the ancient Athenian author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, ...

Fashion

The Dharma of Fashion

If you crave fashion, make friends with your desire

March 30, 2020 • by Otto von Busch

It is said that on the eve of his enlightenment, the Buddha sat beneath a tree and was assailed by the demon Mara. Mara is literally “Death,” the personification of temptation and distraction. Using seductive images and ultimately doubt, Mara challenged the Buddha, distracting him from his goal of enlightenment. ...

Theory & Practice

Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis

In a world shifting more quickly than we can consider, analysis is more important than ever

March 30, 2020 • by Benjamin P. Davis and Jonathon Catlin

Catastrophe is not “to come,” but here and now. Before the current pandemic, our way of life was already killing life on earth. State selections of who shall live and who shall die already produced medical shortages. “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility ...

Philosophy

A Plea for Good Manners

By imitating virtue, we become virtuous

March 23, 2020 • by Robert Mass

Is politeness a virtue? Comte-Sponville, drawing on a long philosophic tradition, understands human virtue as “our way of being and acting humanly, in other words . . our power to act well. . . . It is what we also call the moral virtues, those qualities that make one man seem more human ...

Philosophy

Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

What’s up with that Scholar’s Stone?

February 28, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

Parasite depicts the struggling Kim family, living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, desperately seeking sources of income to afford the very basics to sustain their humble lives. In a portentous scene early in the film, the older child of the family, Ki-Woo, is visited by his wealthy college friend, Min, ...

Imaginal Politics

Philosophy, Coloniality and the Politics of Remembrance

Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

February 27, 2020 • by Chiara Bottici

Prima facie, it would seem that so-called “continental philosophy,” that is, the practice of doing philosophy by engaging in a conversation with authors of the past in the humanities style, is much better situated to convey an accurate image of the past than so-called analytic philosophy, which focuses instead on ...