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

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. Pessimism is a concept that is used in conflicting ways. As there is no clear definition of pessimism that philosophers can agree upon, more often than not it is up to each one to use the term as they see fit and apply it to a wide range of concerns that may have little in common. Faced with this, there are two main options. One is simply to accept that pessimism is a multifaceted co ..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. Possibility is a strange object for philosophical reflection given that it is not really an object at all. We never “see” possibility as such, we only see thwarted possibilities: paths not taken, words left unsaid. In our everyday experience, possibility usually appears to us as absence, regret, even bitterness in the face of the irreversibility of time. The seemingly ineradica ..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. I am a philosopher who studies work. But these days, it is not an easy topic to spend your time thinking about. Everywhere I look, works seems unequivocally bad. I see friends and family who are miserable in, consumed by, or entirely checked out of their jobs. I see students who are deeply sceptical of an economic system which demands so much and offers so little. And I see colleagues who ..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. Group members are: Zakaria Amara, Randall Bagley. Jr., Simone Weil Davis, Tiina Aila Eldridge, Rachel Fayter, Amanda Hill, Drew Leder, Kym Maclaren, Lorraine Pinnock, James Ruston, Keven Simmonds, Natasha Warren, John H. C. Woodland, Jr., Earl Young, Colie, Matthew, Nathan, Tyrone. These writings are interspersed with photographs by Sara Bennett, a former public defender who now photogra ..read more