From The Philosopher, vol. 110, no. 4 ("The New Basics: Philosophy"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. Perhaps even more than politics more generally, the politics of the humanities makes strange bedfellows. As fewer students choose humanities majors, fewer university administrators see the reason to keep the departments in existence. Many pure researchers bristle at an increasing turn towards what they consider scholarly activism, while their colleagues (with plenty of friends ..read more

If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a subscriber or making a small donation. The Philosopher is unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. In recent years there has been a vibrant flourishing of interest in the Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1670), best known for the Ethics and the Theologico-Political Treatise. In this forum, four emerging critical voices walk with Spinoza, bringing him into dialogue with contemporary political and philosophical challenges. Dan Taylor begins with an overview of Spinoza’s contribution to politics, drawing out its ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 1 ("Punishment"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. With relatively few exceptions and across all fields, careerist concerns have always exercised a parasitical relationship upon artistic authenticity. From music to literary fiction to the visual arts, instead of facilitating original expression and legitimate talent, too often marketing apparatchiks, surreptitiously adopting the guise of artists themselves, stand poised to interfere with ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 110, no. 4 ("The New Basics: Philosophy"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. Let’s imagine two kingdoms. The first kingdom is orderly and the people respectful. There, if a child screams, “Look at my spinning top move!” and another shouts back, “It’s not going anywhere!”, a calm adult will simply point out that the rim of the top is indeed moving circularly through the horizontal plane, while the toy is also staying still with respect to the vertical ..read more

Image © Joanna Borkowska From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 1 ("Punishment"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Philosopher, last year saw the publication of two issues [here and here] concerning the future of philosophy, both inside academia and in the public sphere. The contributions highlighted our ongoing preoccupation with the matter of how philosophy ought to understand itself.  I am persuaded by Bernard Williams’ vi ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 110, no. 4 ("The New Basics: Philosophy"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. Imagination has at times gotten a bad rap in philosophy. While Hume considered it to be our primary source of knowledge of modality and Kant assigns it an essential role in perception, Plato speaks for many in philosophy when he associates it with the irrational part of humanity in the Republic. Writing in the 12th century, Maimonides identifies imagination with “evil inc ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 110, no. 4 ("The New Basics: Philosophy"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. By recitation and rote, students at the earliest known centres of education in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Greece and western Africa laboured to learn a series of techniques for studying worlds that no longer exist. From medicine, astronomy, geography to the information management of cuneiform, methods and purposes of understanding have transformed in unimaginable ways ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 1 ("Punishment"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. “Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.” Kevin Plank, founder of the sports apparel company Under Armour, said this memorable line in a 2014 interview with USA Today following a poor performance by the US speed-skating team in the winter Olympics. As the manufacturer of the team’s suits, Under Armour had become an easy scapegoat. Whether or not the suit was the cause of the tea ..read more

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 1 ("Punishment"). If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. “What is home, but a feeling of homesickness/ for the flight’s lost moment of fluttering terror?” asks Robert Lowell in “Pigeons,” a poem dedicated to Hannah Arendt from his 1961 collection Imitations. “Pigeons” rouses many of the implicit questions that Lyndsey Stonebridge’s new intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt sets in motion: What does it mean to understand someone? Does it requi ..read more

Family Portrait 1 (1915) by Florine Stettheimer If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated. Mother’s Day makes me uncomfortable. I avoid social media platforms, flooding with childlike expressions of gratitude for mothers who appear to be paragons of virtue. As the oldest daughter in a large, first-generation immigrant family, I can’t relate. My mother struggled with financial and mental instability and was unable to hold down a job for long. Her longest employment stints were as a su ..read more