Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.

Jürgen Habermas recently argued that the pandemic measures of the German government hadn’t gone far enough. To weigh the state’s duty to protect life against other rights and freedoms was unconstitutional, he warned. In the ensuing controversy, critics accused him of authoritarianism. ...

Read More
Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown

QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

Alienation, anxiety, and religion

QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is battling an organized and criminal deep state—which also happens to be a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles engaged in sex-trafficking—and that this battle is moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which our president will ...
Read More
QAnon as a Byproduct of a Broken America

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...
Read More
The Enigma of Rescue

Being and Surrounding

A Review of Gianni Vattimo

The imminent end of most life on Earth due to environmental catastrophe is no longer a matter of mythological prophecies or science fiction flicks, but a scientific fact. Yet few scientists speak freely about it as their careers usually depend on external corporate funding. What is needed in the face ...
Read More
Being and Surrounding

Creaturely Love

Symposium on Love

Today I would like to briefly talk about some of the ways I think that love makes us both more and less than human. But first a nutshell version of my understanding of love. Love is a technology (as I have argued in a book called Love and Other Technologies). Indeed, it is ...
Read More
Creaturely Love

Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy

A review of Santiago Zabala’s ‘Why Only Art Can Save Us’

It was reported in the Washington Post that the Trump White House had asked to borrow Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting Landscape with Snow from the Guggenheim Museum in New York in order to display it in the President’s private quarters. [1] The request for the Van Gogh was refused. In its place, the Guggenheim offered ...
Read More
Fake Art and Inauthenticity in Philosophy

Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

Thinking Gianni Vattimo through Black Mirror, the ‘Nosedive’ Episode

The philosopher Gianni Vattimo formulated his hermeneutics on ‘Weak Thought’, in his work Art’s Claim to Truth (1979). Weak Thought is “nothing other than the knowledge, acceptance, and recognition that philosophy, after the deconstruction of metaphysics, cannot capture the ultimate essence of its objects but must comply with multiplicity of ...
Read More
Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

Gianni Vattimo Interview

Gianni Vattimo is considered to be among the most important living European philosophers, alongside Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas.  Known for his interpretation of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies, he also developed a postmodern theory he calls "weak thought," meant to question the hard objectivity of claims in religion, politics, and ...

Read More
Gianni Vattimo Interview

Against “Charm”

The Uses of Autobiography for Philosophy

Moreover, how other philosophers lived and died is not the most important thing about them either: while life and work are inseparable, the latter takes pride of place. Heidegger went too far in saying that all one needs to know about Aristotle, for philosophical purposes, was that he lived, then ...
Read More