I value George Orwell’s writing for his devotion to truthfulness and his recognition of all the ways that truths get corrupted. This is why, even if his private mores are of his time, his public writing still gives us tools to think about ours. By Rebecca Solnit The feminist writer Moira Donegan recently mocked contemporary social… Read More George Orwell in an age of moralists
There are no softballs in Arianne Shahvisi’s “Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice.” Instead, the Kurdish-British author, ethicist and academic sets up the reader with exactly the sort of provocative questions many of us heard from our most whataboutist friends and family members. “Has ‘political correctness’ gone too far?” she asks in one… Read More ‘We are all implicated in this system’: A philosopher’s advice for surviving unethical times
In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon Jonardon Ganeri In elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a… Read More Solace and saudade
Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy: By Robin Waterfield DAISY DUNN Contrary to many people’s perception of him, Plato did not spend his entire life listening to Socrates philosophising in colonnades in Athens or writing dialogues meandering through complex ideas. He was once captured in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and put up for… Read More Was He Apollo’s Son?
the spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord Tom Bunyard The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society.’ Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow… Read More History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
By Richard Wolin Martin Heidegger’s influence has been enormous. Richard Rorty once justifiably claimed that it would be impossible to write the intellectual history of the 20th century without acknowledging Heidegger’s titanic impact. But these tributes to Heidegger’s prodigious achievements are question-begging in one crucial respect: they neglect to consider what we are actually reading when… Read More To Sanitize the Master’s Corpus: On the Heidegger Hoax
Dilip Simeon NB: This work-in-progress paper was my contribution to a conference hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen, Norway. The conference( May 31-June 2, 2023) was titled 200 Years of Socialism: Revisiting the Old Dilemmas: First Annual Global Research Programme on Inequality Lecture Abstract: The Bolshevik confiscation of the… Read More Militant capitalism, bad infinity, and the longing for total revolution
The destruction of truth is so advanced in capitalist culture that it should come as no surprise that even in the halls of Critical Theory, imagined sanctum sanctorum of independent consciousness and conscience, truth is now openly profaned and condescended to by some among those who, historically, have been charged with sheltering its sacred flame… Read More John Sanbonmatsu: Postmodernism and the corruption of the academic intelligentsia (2006)
First posted May 27, 2016 RP 193 (Sept/Oct 2015) / Commentary Schneier, who was privy to Snowden’s troves before publication, lists four modes by which the peoples’ victory was secretly undermined by the NSA and GCHQ. First, their weakening of cryptographic algorithms. Second, their piggybacking of domestic surveillance applications through enforced secret back doors – for example,… Read More Daniel Nemenyi: Submarine state – On secrets and leaks
First posted December 05, 2017 by Harriet Swain The historian, a key player in the libel case involving Holocaust denier David Irving, talks about Trump, Goebbels and why he agrees with John Bercow NB: This is a therapeutic article for those who are beginning to falter in their belief in truth, not the Absolute, but the… Read More Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain
After the truth-shower 