G. W. F. Hegel Archives - Public Seminar

The New School

Critchley on Recognition

Philosopher Simon Critchley addressed the 2026 graduates of the New School for Social Research

May 28, 2026 • by Simon Critchley

We are delighted to publish the address delivered at the 2026 New School for Social Research Recognition Ceremony by Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR. Minor edits have been made for brevity. Well, it’s been another peaceful, happy and crisis-free year at The New School. We here onstage ...

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....

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 ...

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

Capitalism

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

In search of an elusive concept

August 27, 2020 • by Ben Kodres-O'Brien

In 2014, a Museum of Capitalism opened for the first time, as if to commemorate a dying form of life. “The museum began just as capitalism ended,” declared the wall text for the most recent iteration of the travelling museum, at The New School in New York in fall 2019: ...

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

Race

Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

July 23, 2020 • by Nadia Y. Kim

We are all familiar with the racist tactics that vaulted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. He demonized Mexicans, he denounced Muslims, and he cozied up on Twitter to ardent White supremacists. In recent weeks, he’s relentlessly attacked the Black Lives Matter protests. Amid all the vitriol, it’s easy to overlook ...

Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

Politics

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

January 23, 2018 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...

Feature

Marx’s Radical Development

Following Marx’s Train of Thought

November 16, 2016 • by Aaron Jaffe

There have been a few recent calls for a return to Marx, or openness to the thought that he “got it right.” To be sure, Marx got a lot -- a lot -- right, but simply peering into his writing desk -- as if setting things right for all time ...

Uncategorized

When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?

Time is running out for Israel-Palestine

December 10, 2015 • by Piki Ish-Shalom

On a cold, dreary November morning in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, I finally understood why owls are seen as wise, why in the ancient world they represented Athena and Minerva, the goddesses of wisdom. On my way from an academic symposium in Great Barrington ...

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When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?

Uncategorized

The Mastery of Non-Mastery

A report and reflections from Kobane

August 7, 2015 • by Michael Taussig

As I write, the plug is being pulled on the steady-state.

Violence and tragedy take revenge on humanity through routinization. Sooner or later we become immune.

But is there a reverse process, such as Freud writes about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the ...

Education

The German Geist Dwells Nowhere

March 19, 2015 • by Omri Boehm and Paul A. Kottman

The turmoil surrounding Heidegger’s Black Notebooks achieved new heights recently, with Freiburg University’s announcement that its legendary Heidegger Lehrstuhl would be abolished and converted to a junior professorship in logic (!) and analytic philosophy, as if to deliberately obliterate Heidegger’s legacy. Apparently, the Lehrstuhl has become too controversial. This decision may well ...