Tag: Metaphysics

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; -- Yeats, The Second Coming Tell me if you can relate to this, but these past weeks I have been thinking about the role of artists and thinkers in difficult...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...