Uncategorized Archives - Page 23 of 53

Uncategorized

Gender and Domination

February 3, 2016 • by Chiara Bottici and Jamieson Webster

Why do people fight for their own servitude as if it were their own deliverance? This is a question that has been at the heart of philosophy for a long time under the heading of voluntary servitude, ideology, or more recently, domination. The aim of this seminar is to explore ...

Uncategorized

Circular Firing Squads, Elephants in the Room, and Dead Parrots

February 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Usually it is the Democratic Party that is most adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This year is very different. The Republicans have beat the Democrats in setting up a circular firing squad by ceasing to be a political party, or rather by morphing into a party ...

Uncategorized

Paul Krugman and the Grand Inquisitor

January 31, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

According to Krugman’s latest column, the difference between Sanders and Clinton is this: Sanders believes that all evil stems from big money; Clinton believes that big money is one evil, but there are also other evils like racism and sexism. How stupid does Krugman think his readers are to hand ...

Uncategorized

Marcel Mariën

January 27, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Mariën had a colorful life. From a working class family, he left school at fifteen to become an apprentice photographer, but after discovering René Magritte, became instead an apprentice to the Belgian Surrealists. Briefly a prisoner of war, he claimed to have spent the remainder of the war years smuggling ...

Uncategorized

Krugman vs. Sanders

January 25, 2016 • by Eli Zaretsky

Scarcely a day goes by without Paul Krugman hammering away at Bernie Sanders. And the message is always clear. Change is difficult. It requires compromise. You can’t try to do too much. People like Sanders are ridiculous. They think all a President needs to do is snap her fingers and ...

Uncategorized

In Defense of Gravitas

January 25, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

“I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television ...

Uncategorized

Was Wittgenstein a Realist or an Antirealist?

January 25, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

(A while back, in my post “The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer”, promised a series of philosophically oriented posts that would explore “whether Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Dewey successfully evaded the dualisms they struggled with, or how well they manage to avoid the extremes of nihilism and ...

Uncategorized

Mr. Clinton’s Lament

January 11, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

In 2014, when the editorial staff of The New Republic resigned en masse to protest its looming corporatization by a publisher aiming to convert it to “a vertically integrated digital media company,” I was a bit smug in my surprise. Ironic, I thought: the magazine, which lurched from “popular front” ...

Uncategorized

A Slow Reader’s Books of the Year

January 10, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

So I managed to read, and write about some twenty-odd books in 2015. I’m a slow reader, so they were not all published in that year. Some go back four or five years, and have sat on my shelves demanding attention for so long that I finally felt like I ...

Uncategorized

Prisoners of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Here is the problem. In my humble opinion, Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate running for the office of President of the United States of America. His policies are sound, his integrity unimpeachable, his intelligence undeniable. He is also attracting tremendous crowds, and raising significant funds while bypassing (as ...

Uncategorized

The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I think it safe to say that 1971 was a watershed year for philosophy, in that it saw the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Prior to the publication of that work, political philosophy was in a kind of self-imposed exile. Still in thrall to the metaethical constraints of ...

Uncategorized

Orbán’s Politics of Fear and Hatred in Hungary

On a European nation’s far-right response to the refugee crisis

December 23, 2015 • by János Kis

Although the position on the migrant issue put forward by the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is morally hard to digest, many people think it is nevertheless the only way to save Europe from the flood of masses that threatens to destabilize the continent. I dispute this ...