The lead essay in this issue, “Rings & Books,” is a script prepared for BBC radio in the 1950s by the British philosopher Mary Midgley (1919-2018). Rejected by the editor as a “trivial, irrelevant intrusion of domestic matters into intellectual life,” it was never aired—or published in English—until now. It comes to us courtesy of the Midgley Estate and the research collaboration (Women) in... Source ..read more

Practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors. In case you doubt that, here are some figures Unmarried Plato Plotinus Bacon Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Hobbes Locke Berkeley Hume Kant Married Socrates Aristotle Hegel I do not cram the groaning scale with monks and friars, because there is always the chance that they had some other reason, besides philosophy... Source ..read more

How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel §255 This remark, like many of Wittgenstein’s, seems to arise from self-examination. The answer he gives suggests that he is concerned with learning just by thinking, and indeed with the particular kind of learning just by thinking that happens in philosophy (as opposed to, say... Source ..read more

By now we are all acquainted with the pandemic’s pathology of feeling. We know about the loneliness, the hopelessness, and the grief. But there are other reactions, less prominent but not rare. In my case, the past two years have been accompanied by a curiously persistent case of nostalgia. I go on little quests of memory, in search of images tediously generic and blazingly specific. Source ..read more

Across the United States, school districts are being assailed for asking students to come to terms with history. The attacks have challenged the teaching of such novels as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) to high school literature students, and accounts of school desegregation such as Ruby Bridges Goes to School (2003) to elementary-school children. As efforts to purge school curricula of difficult... Source ..read more

Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t fully appreciate how many princesses inhabit the Disney cinematic universe. Of course, I was aware of the iconic female characters from the animated movies, from Snow White through Ariel and Jasmine right up to Moana, Merida, and Elsa. If pressed, I probably would have been able to tell you that each of these individual characters is a princess... Source ..read more

If you feel disillusioned with the political and social status quo, you are not alone. The list of global and more localized existential threats is daunting, including pandemics, inflation, political polarization, mass shootings, offensive warfare, and climate change. We seem unable to course-correct. Doing so would require collective action. But institutions such as nation states... Source ..read more

Welcome to the first issue of The Raven, a magazine devoted to reviving the tradition of philosophical literature that deserves to be called literature. The Raven will publish original philosophy that is welcoming to readers with or without academic training in philosophy. Although “public philosophy” as currently practiced benefits the profession of philosophy—and, one hopes, the public as well... Source ..read more

In the midst of the 2020 protests for racial justice, I prepared to teach my annual July mini-course on free speech for incoming FLI (First-Generation and/or Low-Income) students at Amherst College. Almost all of these students are persons of color. My aim in this course is to show students how to analyze the reasoning in an important but difficult text from the history of philosophy... Source ..read more