It is easy enough to dismiss the response of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh to Israel’s assassination of his three sons as the words of a deranged fanatic. Upon being informed that Israeli missiles had killed them, Haniyeh thanked God that they had been martyred. Whatever one might think about Haniyeh at a personal level, philosophy has to try to understand the logic at work in any expressed position and not indulge in dismissive ad hominem. Haniyeh’s response is important because it lays bear the moral structure of fundamentalist thinking. Note that I say “fundamentalist” and not “r ..read more

Now: Presence/Absence To be: a receptive surface accepting, (as gift, not property), the sand that yields to my foot and the fugitive mist that lingers behind and looms before. I wanted to stop and see myself as if in a cloud. But where I am, it is not. We move in time, a dance of impress and erasure. The air is still but a winter chop curls and crashes ashore. Maybe it’s windy in Sandusky. The air is clarifying but too warm for February? I will not follow the arc of the land all the way to the vanishing point. The waves beat time for my footfalls until I stop, lingering, limpid eyes looking o ..read more

In his much discussed and sometimes reviled Preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote: “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” The passage brims with the confidence of a humanism infused with the spirit of scientific advance, but it also raises a number of difficult philosophical questions with important political implications. The mo ..read more

Seismic waves continue to radiate outward from the Gaza war epicentre to rattle Syria,Jordan, Iran, the Arabian peninsula, and the Red Sea. The obvious solution to the instability and danger to life is to stop the war. But the contending parties vow to not stop the war until their objectives are met. But if the objectives are mutually incompatible (the destruction of Hamas vs. the survival of Hamas as the legitimate governing power in Gaza, freedom for Israeli hostages vs. freedom for all Palestinian prisoners, Israeli security vs the creation of a Palestinian state) only the complete destruct ..read more

Are Canada’s universities heading towards an epochal crisis of relevance? Writing in The Hub, a university administrator in a “senior leadership position” at a “well-respected university” worries that they are. Her concerns are not directed at the rising costs of post-secondary education for students, the funding crisis plaguing the institutions of some provinces (especially Ontario), or budget models that tie resources to enrollments and enrollments to employment. She instead focuses on the purported weakening commitment to scholarly excellence and academic freedom. The culprit: woke obsessio ..read more

Chuffed by his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign, Christopher Rufo has just penned a call to arms to “new right activists” to “win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.” He does not tell us what “rightful ends” the state should serve or what those who disagree with them whatever they turn out to be should do. As a manifesto, it lacks the poetry of Marx and Engels. Its fussing over the capture of American institutions by the “far left” is derivative of the anxieties of late 60s and early 1970’s conservatives worried ..read more

The decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and the Secretary of State of Maine to bar Trump (pending appeals to US Supreme Court) from the Republican primary ballot in those states gives practical urgency to abstract debates about the relationship between constitutional principles, the rule of law, and democratic self-determination. On the surface– whatever one thinks of Trump– having judges and a secretary of state (from an opposing party) take pre-emptive steps to remove a candidate from ballots and thus prevent voters from exercising their right to vote for a candidate of their choice seem ..read more

A few weeks ago I went to have my car fixed and I hung around this old garage while it was being fixed. It’s in that kind of punchy village, poorer village. Everything is crumbling and slums and the garage is full or dirt and oil. And you like that stuff, you know, rusty stuff, that kind of atmosphere. You know how one always feels connected with deteriorating things. Phillip Guston, Conversation with Morton Feldman Perhaps we feel an affinity with deteriorating things because we are deteriorating things. Life winds down and past a certain point you cannot deny that truth. But it’s ok; that’s ..read more

After reading the report of the panel that they assembled to look into the financial sustainability of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions, the Ford government probably wished that they had heeded the advice implied in an aphorism from the 1001 Nights: He who asks what he ought not ask will hear an answer he does not want to hear. Asking the panel to look into the financial health of Ontario’s universities and hoping to hear that it could be improved by slimming down faculty fat cats, the government instead heard that their own funding policies are the primary threat to a secure future for On ..read more

My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts n on The Hill behind the school where everyone would slide. A city of children, classless, kinda cause no one had fancier coats or thought they were better than anyone else cause they weren’t: everyone’s dad worked in the mines n their moms at shops in town or cut hair in their living rooms to earn a few extra bucks. Day n night the Hill would draw us together on toboggans or solo on a Krazy Karpet n if you didn’t have either you could use some cardboard or even old boots whose treads had worn out (but not a sled: sleds were snow machines ..read more