Get Your Smart On
120 posts
And the story of Hope, a young whale.
“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would...
Kathi Weeks on the interdependence between work and marriage in our capitalist patriarchal state.
In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized when it is relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to politicize work in much the same ways that feminists have...
Thinking broadly about Linda Williams' piece on body genres (e.g., horror, porn, and melodrama), and the politics of representation, in preparation for Thursday's Feminist Theory session.
One of the big ideas in Linda Williams’s piece on “body genres” in film theory is that perversion should not be used as a pejorative term to condemn some sexualities over others, i.e., to condemn any...
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes, running an analogy between work and marriage. In this piece, I present the carrot and the stick of it, subjugation and subjectification.
In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized by being relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to re-politicize work, much like feminists politicized the...
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes, running an analogy between work and marriage.
In the first part of this series, we explored how both work and marriage are framed as private, individual matters, even though the state actively structures and enforces both arrangements. We’re...
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes.
Kathi Weeks begins The Problem with Work with this brilliant insight that work and marriage are analogous social institutions. Much of her analysis hangs on this analogy, which extends across the...
In this second session, we created the complete course syllabus. We start next Tuesday August 26th, join us!
This session details the meticulous process of creating a syllabus for a six-week, one-credit online course titled “Philosophy of Work and Leisure” at Smarties University. The course, structured with...
Overview of the process, deciding on a time-frame and time commitment, and brainstorming course topics (Live Session 01).
Today it began. We started our venture of creating our own Philosophy courses. You can come along with me on the course I’m making, or you can run parallel to me and create your own course for...
On the virtues of not being so agreeable and challenging others to think.
To the uninitiated, the world of philosophy can often appear to be little more than an endless, arcane debate. Why do philosophers seem to revel in challenging every assumption, dissecting every...
Follow along as I create a Philosophy course using all freely available online materials, then take it with me. Or create your own course alongside and join us from your own parallel universe.
I was really inspired by ’s post for autodidacts, “How to Create Your Own University Course to Teach Yourself Almost Anything,” where Settecase shows readers how to create a course on any topic, then...
All of our everything from the month of July in one place, so you don't miss a thing.
--- ALL YOUR FAVORITE SUBSTACK PHILOSOPHERS AND HUMANISTS IN ONE COMMON FEED. BEHOLD All THE TRUTH, GOODNESS, AND BEAUTY! 📣 Announcing Substack Philosophers’ Alliance (in Beta) This is like a...
1. Don’t Watch This… No Need 2. Tilt-tillating Transcript Bits “GRANDAD: …it's good for many many things it's going to be magnificent in healthcare and education and more or less any industry that...
A primer on embodiment and empathy through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
How can I understand you, what you are feeling and thinking? Why you do the things you do? You are that part of my experience that is not me, and you have the power to affect our shared world. Even...
Reflections on grieving the loss of my favorite coding AI.
--- About six months ago, there was a story making the rounds about an AI companion doll named Moxie that was going to be turned off because the company that made it, Embodied, Inc., went bankrupt...
Readings In Feminist Philosophy and Care
--- Below is a set of feminist philosophy books (and one article) that are related to the study of care and human vulnerability. At the end, there is also a section listing the classic works in...
How evangelical Christian nationalists wage cultural warfare, create the permission structure for dehumanizing vulnerable communities, and threaten our multicultural and multi-racial democracy.
A deliberate and strategic effort to redefine and attack empathy has been underway for nearly twenty years. What might initially appear to be isolated critiques of empathy, upon closer examination...
Martin Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology in the Age of A.I.
--- Let's play the associations game. I say technology, you say? AI, robots, smart phones, computers? In another era, it might have been a factory, the steam engine, railroads, coal energy. Even...
A Hegelian primer on masculinity based on Michael S. Kimmel’s essay “Masculinity as Homophobia,” with a little help from Yanis Varoufakis.
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis argues that we’re witnessing a power struggle between traditional industrial capitalists and a new elite of tech oligarchs who accumulate...
Take your place along the lesbian continuum in this introduction to Adrienne Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.
--- Imagine you are sitting in a hotel conference room and all of a sudden the lights go out. You feel a lot of movement around you, maybe someone brushes past you quickly with a whoosh. When the...
Not language, not rationality, but Care is what makes us human. Looking at how Care underlies all that we are according to Martin Heidegger.
--- “Cura (Care) was crossing a river and saw some clay. Thoughtfully, she took it up and began to shape it. Jupiter came along, and she asked him to give it spirit, which he granted. Then they...
The Politicization of Anti-Empathy in Christian Evangelical and White Nationalist circles.
--- This piece picks up where “The Christian Right’s Anti-Empathy Crusade I” leaves off. You might want to read that first. Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy (2024) Allie Beth Stuckey is a conservative...
20 self-help books paired with revolutionary theory books you could be reading instead.
--- The modern self-help movement emerged in the late 60’s and early 70’s as a part of the feminist movement. Activists like Audre Lorde framed self-care as political resistence, essential to...
The Politicization of Anti-Empathy in Christian Evangelical and White Nationalist circles.
--- This piece picks up where “Dangerous Feelings” left off. You might want to read that first. --- Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy was not published by an academic publisher that would vet the...
The dirty logic underwriting the right-wing war on empathy.
--- This piece examines how Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy, uses a rhetorical strategy called dissociation to cut a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy, to disparage...
The origins of the war on empathy is rooted in an ugly objective neutrality.
--- Prior in this Empathy series: --- Today, I’d like to begin to tell you the story of how those on the religious right (Christian, Evangelical, Nationalists) have mounted the war on empathy over...
What is happening with Empathy is a great case study for understanding the current ideological battle for our humanity. This is a long foot note to part one linked below.
--- Before in the series: --- “…part of what the Christian argument against empathy is is to say that empathy is different from that… It's not just compassion. It's not just sympathy. It's something...
Today, we start a new series enlisting Philosophy in the fight for Empathy and Care.
You might be surprised to learn that the word “empathy” is a fairly new addition to the English language. It was suggested as a translation for the German term einfühlung (“a feeling into”) by...
Re-reading Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto in light of Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley.
I first encountered Donna Haraway's “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a feminist epistemologies seminar in the early 1990s. At that time, we felt that we were on the cusp of something new, and her writing...
I’ve scheduled a live for this Wednesday, April 2 at 1pm EST, on Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” You can easily find a copy of this text online, and above I’ve...
A beginner-friendly introduction to Fanon and postcolonial theory.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant yet deeply unsettling account of the psychological and social effects of colonization on oppressed peoples. Born in Martinique and trained as a...
--- Mindscaping Philosophy Journal Prompt: Imagine a world where experiences serve as currency that you can trade with others. Once traded, these experiences leave your memory completely. Which...
A demystifying introduction to Martin Heidegger's early magnum opus.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. It turned the world of philosophy upside down and inaugurated existentialist phenomenology, existentialism, philosophical...
Mindscaping Philosophical Journal. Volume One, April 2025
Hello Frens, Exciting news! The first volume of Mindscaping, A Philosophical Journal is now available. As a paid subscriber to Philosophy Publics, you're getting exclusive access to this new resource...
A meditation on present absences inspired by Google Says I’m the First Iraqi Female Philosopher - Really? by Rasha Barrage
“Across nations and cultures, entire words and ideas are missing or deprived of the weight they deserve. The presence of absence is just as powerful as the spread of misinformation or false news....
A recording from Mona Mona's live video on Library of America panel on What is Totalitarianism? by Hannah Arendt.
Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. We delve into the six characteristics of totalitarianism as discussed by Seyla Benhabib,...
Jean Paul Sartre’s “The Look” in Being and Nothingness and the problem of the Other
What follows is an exegetical account of Jean Paul Sartre’s section “The Look” from Being and Nothingness. In this section, Sartre explains how our encounter with the Other challenges our own sense...
Notes from today's talk on _What Is Totalitarianism? Understanding Hannah Arendt Now_
As a group, we attended a panel and discussion hosted by the Library of America billed as follows: “The rise of totalitarian governments,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the central event of our world.”...
Friendship allows for shared standpoints, and gives us access to new insights about ourselves, others, and the world that expands our horizons, and our hearts.
Please ‘like’ ❤️ and restack it on Notes if you enjoy this post. It’s the best way to help others find our publication. If you want to do more and can support Philosophy Publics with a paid...
A recording from Philosophy Publics Unplugged with yours truly, Mona Mona.
Thank you for those of you who made it to this Philosophy Publics Unplugged live. Join me for the next live on Wednesdays at 12noon EST. In this episode, we delve into the concept of intuition and...
New subscriber Discord server, Substack Lives, Ask Me Anything, Round-ups, and continuing to think about Friendship.
Dear Frens, Looking back at the past couple weeks, we have been very busy! First, I launched our private subscriber 1. Discord Server where we have been discussing all the things and getting to...
A recording from Philosophy Publics' live video, with Mona Mona. Topics: On Friendship and more.
Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. --- Transcript: Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome. This is our first live. I am Mona Mona. I...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads.
A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (the first is Anti-Oedipus) by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This is a very...
How friendship becomes us. The new, rewritten Part Two of our series on Friendship.
In What Are Friends For? (1993), Marilyn Friedman offers an analysis of friendship in its moral, epistemological, and political dimensions. Her work is clear and analytic, and particularly useful for...
Luce Irigaray's metaphysical framing of the woman question.
"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through." — Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference In An Ethics of Sexual Difference...
Announcing a weekend AMA (Ask Me Anything), round-up of posts, plus philosophical shadow journal questions from our chat space.
Hello Frens! Here is your round-up of Philosophy Publics posts going back a few weeks. Much of this content was in response to requests that came from y’all — keep the great suggestions coming! I’ve...
What the incorporation of women's friendship ideals into companionable marriage can teach us about the radical potential of women's friendships.
It is 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft has just published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a precursor text for a first wave of feminism that will not begin for at least another fifty years.1 Her...
Quick post for a fren, in no particular order...
--- 1. $1 a secret plotCritical Theory - Journalism - ArtBy Tom Pazderka --- 1. $1 Critical Theory & Burning QuestionsCritical Theory & Burning Questions is a Marxist-Leninist publication dedicated...
On the relationship between Phenomenology and Psychology, and a recent attempt to bring them together.
On first glance, Phenomenology and Psychology may seem like similar disciplines, and the relationship between them is super interesting, so thank you anon subscriber for asking after this. Here is my...
Practical tips for establishing a philosophy reading practice and keeping an ideas notebook.
If I were to ask you, do you know how to read? You would probably say, “Oh, yes, of course, I’ve been reading since grade school. I’m a very confident reader!” But the thing is, if it is philosophy...
Part 4 of our series thinking through the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
1. The most challenging aspect of being human right now? > “Being human itself. Belonging to the human race. With its violence, prejudice, evil, greediness and shortsightedness. For 2025 I might get...
A response to The Drill by @jenesaisjj on the political use of the feeling of relief
In the video linked below, TikTok user @jenesaisjj reminds us that Jim Jones, leader of the Jonestown cult, held what he called “White Night” drills, where his followers were instructed to drink...
A guide to commenting on Philosophy and other non-fiction writing on Substack.
I recently announced in our subscriber chat that I would trade one critique for a monthly subscription (see above). It is my way to make Philosophy Publics accessible as I begin to paywall some...
The growing desire for community and our commitment to individualism. Part 3 of thinking through the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
We have watched the price of food rise over the past few years, and so many of us have had to ask ourselves if we can afford our usual groceries. The price we pay for shelter is becoming prohibitive,...
With the TikTok ban hanging over our heads, we have Gamestopped it.
It had been defeated, but popped back up again, twice by my count. And it looks like this time, the TikTok ban will go through. People on TikTok seemed resigned to this almost too quickly, and after...
On information overwhelm and the difficulty knowing what is true, real, and good online. Part 2 of thinking about the most challenging aspects of being human right now.
In our subscriber chat, many of you shared some significant challenges of being human right now: feelings of isolation; information overload; difficulties in building community; and misanthropic...
Announcing the Philosophy Publics chat discussion questions for the month of January.
Hi Frens, We have been having a lot of fun with the philosophy discussion questions in the subscriber Chat. I thought it would be useful to normalize this practice. I am going to post these...
Working through your answers to the question of the single most challenging aspect of being human right now.
In our subscriber chat I asked y’all what you thought was the single most challenging aspect of being human right now, and your answers really capture where we are in this moment. I responded to some...
Empathy is a skill that begins with learning to listen. Here are three personal accounts that open us up to empathy.
1. The Value of Empathy Mike’s SubstackEmpathyAs a young pre-school boy, some of my earliest memories were of time spent fossicking within the ‘benign’ fenced in paradise that was our back garden....
Philosophy is preparation for death, so how have philosophers faced death throughout the millennia?
Philosophy is preparation for death, so said Socrates, the Greek philosopher par excellence, a martyr to the cause, executed by the state in BC for corrupting the youth. According to his pupil Plato,...
A response to Gurwinder's Why Empathy Makes Us Cruel & Irrational
In "Why Empathy Makes Us Cruel & Irrational," author characterizes empathy as an emotionally transmitted disease, a virus, and as a parasite. He claims that empathy debilitates thought, makes us...
There is good in arguing, even if it is not persuasion. Here is me riffing-off of Arguing Is Bullshit by David Pinsof @everythingisbullshit
> “Arguing has little to do with persuasion; it is an agonistic contest of wills and wits. …that is not quite persuasion, and so we may now want to ask: What is persuasion, really? Does it even...
5 Substack posts to help you enter into Nietzsche's thought.
1. Nobody understands Nietzsche (except me) by Sam Kriss recounts his adolescent fascination with Nietzsche, initially driven by a Gnostic yearning for intellectual escape from the perceived...
Existentialism, a philosophy centered on individual existence and freedom, traces its roots to the 19th-century thinkers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Though differing significantly in...
Maria Lugones' Playfulness, 'World'-Traveling, and Loving Perception, a treatment.
> “Then I want to take up the practice [of world-traveling] as a horizontal practice of resistance to two related injunctions: the injunction for the oppressed to have our gazes fixed on the...
I know you're angry and frightened now, but don't stay mad for too long. We have work to do.
Everywhere we look, women are divided. The perception that a majority of Anglo-American women voted for the Trump ticket in the recent elections has created a rift between white and other women, a...
Part Two of our treatment of Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is A Humanism where Sartre gets to defining what Humanistic Existentialism is, after defending it against what it is not.
FOLLOW TO PREVIOUS PART ONE: --- In this second part, Sartre defends Existentialism against common critiques that it is politically ineffective, pessimistic, and too individualistic or solipsistic....
These are my pick for the top fifteen, most readable works in the History of Western Philosophy. Let this list inspire you in your pursuit of wisdom, and that you will get some good ideas about what...
Part One of our treatment of Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Is A Humanism
In this old thinkPhilosophy podcast from 2018, I explore Jean-Paul Sartre's essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” a key introduction to existentialist philosophy. Sartre argues that existentialism’s...
I recently posted what I thought was a rather strange question to Notes: > “This is going to sound like a strange question, but what does thinking feel like, for you? If you had to describe it,...
What Is So Good About Becoming A Feminist? I invite you to find out for yourselves.
Jumping in where Becoming-Feminist leaves off, I want to convince you, dear reader, to join us in reading and discussing feminist philosophy by showing you all the wonderful things that will come...
Antagonisms of the Everyday: Philosophy, Culture, PoliticsPolitics and Philosophy on the irregularities and antagonisms of everyday life. Focusing on US,UK, European politics and political theory,...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads
Of Grammatology established Jacques Derrida as a major figure in contemporary philosophy and introduced both différance and deconstruction. This work includes two key early essays by Derrida: “The...
Don't be afraid, we've got this. For all the things they have revealed in their 2025 plan, there are already people organizing resistance, so get plugged in locally and learn the ropes ASAP.
I’ll cut to the chase. Here is a list of changes we can expect, and since I didn’t want to give you this scary list without actionables, below are some quick ideas for how you can prepare to weather...
Revisiting Anthony Appiah's freaky Friday identity experiments
Would you still be you if you were born as a boy instead of a girl, or as a girl instead of a boy? That is, if your sex assignment were different that it was when you were born, would that change the...
Theodor Adorno, one of the foremost thinkers from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, made a lasting impact with his critiques of mass culture and the homogenization of society. In The Culture...
A reading of Sandra Bartky's Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness
Sandra Lee Bartky would have been 90 years old this year, were she still alive. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 81 in her Michigan home. Her essay, "Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist...
A private space for us to converse and connect
Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: Philosophy Publics subscriber chat. This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live...
What can a piece of paper teach us about what thinking is for?
In this example, I am your professor in this undergraduate Introduction To Philosophy. This is an experiment I did run in many of my classes. I would come out from behind the lectern holding a piece...
A Primer on the etymology, history, ideas and practices of Phenomenology
Etymology What exactly is the appeal of etymology? I am fascinated by tracking meanings down throughout the ages. You can see meaning accumulating, taking a turn, and evolving over time. Concepts get...
🎉 Celebrating 1k Subscribers with a 📖 Bibliography of Feminist Thinkers 🎉
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Continuum, 1990. Adams explores the intersections of feminism, vegetarianism, and animal rights, arguing that...
Why I think that we are being transitioned from a consumer economy to a creator economy
In Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, the dialectic is resolved when the Master realizes his dependence on the Slave, who produces the goods that maintain the Master’s life —mutual recognition becomes...
The Fear, Fantasy, and the Real Material Conditions The public conversation about Large Language Models (LLMs, collectively referred to as AI) has revolved around fears and fantasies as depicted in...
1. Rags To Reason "Rags to Reason" delves into existential themes, the interplay of art and ethics, and the relevance of classical philosophers like Aristotle and Sartre in modern contexts. The...
Relativism. Skepticism. Incommunicability. Nihilism. Death.
Philosophy is an extreme intellectual sport. We would like to believe that doing philosophy is only and always good, but doing philosophy can be extremely dangerous. Most obvious is the risk of...
The Story of Space: Elaborations of Void in Hellenistic Philosophy
Once we get to Modern Philosophy, concepts of space become more familiar and consequently feel more “real.” It is difficult for us to relate to space as a whirling receptacle steered by Goddesses; or...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads
Society Of The Spectacle is a seminal work written by Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International (SI for short), a radical avant-garde movement composed of artists, intellectuals, and...
The Story of Space: Aristotle’s Container View Of Space as Place and Extendable Limit
If you want to understand how change is possible in the simplest sense of movement from one place to another, you need an account of the space across which that thing moves. This is Aristotle’s...
The Story of Space: Plato’s Appropriation of Reproduction in the Timeaus and Beyond
In her classic “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Elizabeth Spellman shows us how Plato argues for the education of women alongside men, and for the inclusion of women in all social classes...
The Story of Space: The Strange Non-Being of Space and the Logic of Negation
Up to this point in this series, we have examined the first figuration of space as a receptacle of being that is (1) analogous to women’s bodies in reproduction, and (2) akin to Necessity in its...
The Story of Space: On Necessity, the Receptacle, and Spatial Receptivity In Plato’s Timaeus Plato’s Timaeus is a “cosmontology”: it purports to tell the story of the origins of all being(s), and it...
The Story of Space: The ontological journey from the Unlimited to the Void.
The Story of Space: Presocratic Roots This essay is the first in a series on the history of concepts of space in Western Philosophy. Here we discuss the mythical and ontological precursors to Plato’s...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads
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)...
The problem of the Other in Continental European Philosophy as backdrop for understanding US-American individualism.
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...
Extended space versus the interval of negative space in art and representation.
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...
In this second part on the Subject and its Other, I give an overview of Levinasian Ethics and explain how it shifts the discourse on the Other, and some feminist philosophers are listening in.
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...
Butler's first book lays the groundwork for her theory of gender performativity, the deconstruction of the sex/gender binary, and build upon Gayle Rubin's theory of compulsory heterosexuality.
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...
If we can replicate the best aspects of philosophy outside of academia, philosophy will have been set free. And she wants to be free.
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 twenty years in the making (1990-2010). I wrote this in 2012, I wonder if it holds up, but be warned that this gets dark in the end.
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...
The Other affects us as if we were love-stricken, and we fall into the vortex of their activities in our shared world.
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"...
We need others in order to become ourselves, and Continental European Philosophy gives us the theory to underpin this intuition. But also, as Sartre wrote, hell is other people. What gives?
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...
I wrote the first version of this as a Medium post before ChatGPT, LLMs and AIs became the hype-thing it is today, just for the record. 😉
> 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...
Broad strokes takes on German Idealism, Dialectics, the Racist Science of Craniology, Dialectical Materialism (Marxism), Women's Suffrage, Existential Angst and the birth of Existentialism
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...
Leaping-in, Leaping-ahead, and the importance of playing a supportive role in caring for others.
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...
Whereupon we finally answer the question. In less than 500 words.
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...
Here is the rub. I would like to spend most all of my time writing about philosophy and feminist theory, but given that I was recently resigned from my job (you heard me right, I didn’t resign but...
My response to Elle Grffin's “Could AI make us wise?,” in The Elysian Substack, and a regurgitation. Skip to the regurgitation if you're short on time.
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...
On getting to know thyself and self-authoring your life story. Or just get out of an identity rut.
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...
But you should insist on meaningful work anyways. A philosophical meditation involving the ideas of Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Graeber, and Camus.
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...
Framing human problems philosophically could prove, well, enlightening.
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...
US-American projections, intellectualism, and the power of unintended effects.
In the early 1990s, I became infatuated with something called French Feminism. Toril Moi's book Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Ty (1985) had introduced Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and...
Dogs in the History of Philosophy.
1. Dogs as Symbols of Virtue In Ancient Worlds Diogenes of Sinope (404 BC - 323 BC), a prominent figure in Greek philosophy and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy, famously used the dog as a...
Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Imagine someone walking down a busy street engrossed in their smartphone, completely oblivious to their surroundings. Suddenly, they walk straight into a lamppost. The immediate, almost reflexive...
The following examples are taken from either historical or currently existing movements and initiatives. While they may not be flawless, they provide us with a tangible glimpse into what is already...
Toni Negri on the revolutionary potential of creative autonomy as a way out and forward.
In this engaging dialogue, Toni Negri explores his philosophical and political journey, spanning from his early engagement with Marxism and workerism (operaismo) to his later involvement with...
Funny quips from the annals of Philosophy.
While philosophers have a reputation for being as heavy 🏋️♂️ as they are deep 🌊, the following stories from the annals of Philosophy is evidence that philosophers can be pretty darn funny, not...
Here are seven reasons why we still care to study Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic in the Phenomenology of Sprit, with a brief exegesis of the text.
Exegesis of “Self-Consciousness” and the Master/Slave Dialectic Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is a seminal work in German Idealism that charts the development of human...
Part Two of The Desire For Community series
Part One: The Desire for Community As is true of many of the stories that we tell ourselves, the narrative creates the reality in which that story makes sense and becomes truth. For example, my...