The essays collected under the title On Female Body Experience represent twenty years of work in feminist phenomenology by one of its chief practitioners, Iris Marion Young. These essays showcase...
One of the most important works in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prolific career, The Social Contract begins with a rejection of Hobbes’ premise that civil society begins with individuals relinquishing...
Pushing Off Of Aristotle Heidegger criticizes Aristotle’s study of beings in the Physics and Metaphysics because it assumes things/objects as the primary focus. Humans (subjects, more precisely)...
1. The Subject and its Other in Continental Philosophy In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of individualism is permeated with post-World...
Hans Hofmann, artist and philosopher, developed and wrote about how to create volume and depth on a two dimensional plane through the push and pull between colors and forms. Hofmann theorizes the...
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): The Face-to-Face Encounter With The Other Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking on intersubjectivity and the Other begins from the rejection of previous models that don’t seem to...
A foundational text for feminist philosophy and queer theory, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity offers a collection of essays that develop a post-structuralist analysis of the...
There was a recent flutter on Twitter about public philosophy, what it is and what counts as public philosophy. I opined that I didn’t think that you could be both a public philosopher and an...
Queer has the bad reputation of being undefinable, but we will nonetheless offer three or four ways of understanding “queer,” here organized from the most general to the most narrow.1 The most...
This piece explores the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how our relationship to the world and to ourselves is shaped by our interactions with primordial others. "Primordial otherness"...
In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of my own individualism is permeated with post-World War II existentialist ideas of the invention of...
Epicurus’ tetrapharmakon, or remedies for being at peace, is comprised of four maxims, as follows: 1. Don’t Fear God Epicurus believed that whatever entity created the cosmos, it could not possibly...
> But, I would argue that much of what actually characterizes everyday life — the creative moments arising out of artful improvisation on the spur of the moment — will still continue to be opaque to...
This piece was originally based on a thread of tweets that I wrote while viewing Travis Ross’ Youtube lecture entitled: Early 19th-Century Philosophy: German Idealism and its Reception. The sound...
In the course of giving his account of intersubjectivity (or the Being-with others of Mitsein), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) comments on two kinds of concern for the other — a leaping in for and a...
You might already know this: Philosophy comes from two Greek words — love (philia) and wisdom (sophia) — that translate to “love of wisdom.” The first precept of wisdom is knowing that you don’t know...
In a recent post at The Elysian Substack entitled “Could AI make us wise?,” Elle Grffin (@ellegriffin) suggests that training an AI to curate the best content for us, based on our values, could lead...
Questioner: I've been feeling a bit lost lately. I've faced some hard challenges that make me question everything and I don’t know if my reactions and opinions are actually mine. I think that growing...
The pivotal moment in G.W. Friedrich Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic occurs when a slave, engaged in the work of making things for the master's consumption, sees himself1 in those things and there...
Question: "Would you rather live paycheck to paycheck in a big lively city or comfortably paid in a remote and isolated village? I have the opportunity of working as a physiotherapist in a village...