Tag: philosophy

Louis Althusser: An Intellectual Adventure (2017)

Louis Althusser – an Intellectual Adventure (2017) This documentary traces the development of the thought of the Marxist French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990), who influenced a whole generation of philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Zizek. Famous for his Definition of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Althusser is credited with reinterpreting Marx in a… Read More Louis Althusser: An Intellectual Adventure (2017)

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Claudia Koontz: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule

First posted December 29, 2011 The Third George J. Wittenstein Lecture: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule  To ‘resist’, from the Latin resistere, means to stand fast, to uphold principles against pressure to abandon them Claudia Koonz discusses the appeal of the Nazis’ mandate to ‘Love only the neighbour who is like thyself’ Using examples… Read More Claudia Koontz: Hitler’s Assault on the Golden Rule

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Whither philosophy?

The discipline today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help Siobhan Lyons As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is… Read More Whither philosophy?

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Wrestling with relativism

Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right Daniel Callcut Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact… Read More Wrestling with relativism

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Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy

By Anthony Grafton Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. Anthony Grafton explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a… Read More Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy

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Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)

First posted July 12, 2013 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 1993 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany, 1993 Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 1993 Reviewed by Peter Osborne – click for a pdf: Radical Philosophy 070 (Mar/Apr 1995) There are moments in the reception of particular thinkers – especially in… Read More Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)

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Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality

William Egginton As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders.… Read More Quantum poetics: Borges and Heisenberg on language and reality

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