Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's own experience with chronic illness exposed the gaps in Descartes' mind-body dualism — showing him, and us, how little ground for optimism his notion of reason's autonomy really offers.

A recap of the ground covered in the Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy — from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir — plus an invitation to join the Fall cohort.

In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Michael Foucault traces the transition from a system of public punishment and torture to the privatization of punishment through the creation of...

In *State of Exception* (the second volume in the series entitled Homo Sacer), Giorgio Agamben examines how governments avail themselves of states of emergency to assume extra-legal powers under the guise of protecting the public interest.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

> “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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...