Category: Philosophy

August 25, 2020

The Timeliness of Julia Kristeva’s The Enchanted Clock

By Armine Kotin Mortimer

“Kristeva deftly weaves together multiple strands of a narrative that links a presently degraded state of France, Europe, and the world, in the grip of violence, fanaticism, rigid identity politics, anti-intellectualism, a general loss of quality of life, to the...

August 13, 2020

Book Excerpt! Social Appearances: A Philosophy of Display and Prestige, by Barbara Carnevali

“Barbara Carnevali’s concept of ‘social aesthetics’ is tremendously powerful, and explains a lot of otherwise baffling phenomena. Carnevali makes me think that the rise of Orban and Trump and the Brexit movement is better understood as a matter of social...

August 11, 2020

Zakiya Hanafi on Translating Works of Philosophy

“This is a powerful and paradigm-shifting aesthetics of society, by a great philosophical talent.” ~Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us It’s the second week of Women in Translation Month! This week’s #WITMONTH feature comes to us from...

August 6, 2020

Taking the Risk to Translate as Our Intelligence Morphs

By Carolyn Shread

“Malabou, with her characteristic clarity and insight, radically redraws the lines between humans and machines, brains and computers. Morphing Intelligence is a major achievement and not to be missed.” ~Adrian Johnston, author of A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and...

August 4, 2020

The Other Corona Crisis: The Anger It’s Going to Unleash Once It’s Over

By Mark Blyth

“With considerable sophistication and a good dose of humour, this book dissects the popular anger that has made our economics unsustainable and our politics dysfunctional. Lonergan and Blyth rightly call for a reset of our current model of capitalism. To...

August 4, 2020

Online Teaching and Collective Intelligence: The Poison or the Cure?

By Catherine Malabou

“In this remarkable book, Catherine Malabou focuses on the transformations of ‘intelligence’ as it moves from genetics to epigenetics to automatism. Historically grounded, philosophically astute, and engagingly written, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in intelligence—artificial and natural—and...

August 1, 2020

Women in Translation Month 2020! A Celebration of Philosophy and Literature

Welcome to Women in Translation Month 2020! WITMonth was launched six years ago when blogger and scholar Meytal Tadzinkski noticed that works by women authors made up less than 30% of the books translated into English. Since then, WITMonth has...

July 24, 2020

Book Excerpt! Universality and Identity Politics (introduction)

“Against the many theories conflating universality with positive content and violent oppression, Universality and Identity Politics illustrates how movements beyond the particular are indispensable for solidarity. Ceaseless catastrophes now rain down; McGowan boldly underwrites new political imaginings of equality and freedom.” ~Anna...

July 23, 2020

Where Is the Universal?

By Todd McGowan

“Passionately yet patiently argued, Universality and Identity Politics looks back at earlier debates surrounding the universal and mounts fresh defenses of it. More than timely, this book writes to the moment.” ~Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics...

July 10, 2020

Book Excerpt! Readings of Dōgen’s “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,” by Steven Heine (preface)

“Heine has written a comprehensive, detailed, and accessible analysis of the textual, religious, and philosophical intricacies of Dōgen’s master work, Shōbōgenzō. This careful work of synthesis builds on his own original scholarship on Zen and the Shōbōgenzō itself, and is one of the...

July 8, 2020

“The time is already ripe”: On Modern Appropriations of a Traditional Japanese Religious Philosopher

By Steven Heine

“Vigorous and insightful, Readings of Dōgen’s “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye” provides a deep inspection of central themes in Dōgen’s vast literary legacy. In a clear and inspiring manner, Heine’s analysis sheds crucial light that clarifies both the beauty...

July 3, 2020

Q&A: Idan Landau and Noam Chomsky on Skepticism

“Differentiating between problems, which we can solve, and mysteries, which we cannot, Chomsky concludes that the relationship between brain and consciousness may well be a mystery. Still, we can explore.” ~Jackson Lears, London Review of Books Welcome back to the...