The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

Photograph by Lordspudz by Benjamin Franklin To Madame Brillon, of Passy You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spend that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joly, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time...

The Office: An American Workplace, NBC by Peter Fleming Power At Play: The Relationships Between Play, Work and Governance, by Niels Åkerstrom Andersen, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 192. Neo-liberalism seems to persist through a double life. For sure, it believes in itself like all forms of fundamentalist thought, but...

For, we’ve always known that Kim Jong Il is a media event. Not just in death, but right from the very start. Unless you were in his inner circle, no one even knew him other than through the media. He might well have never even been born—or been born...

There has been some interesting discussion at the NewAPPS blog, about the idea of 'academic passing', initiated by a thoughtful guest post from Kristie Dotson. It has been unclear to me throughout this discussion, since Dotson's initial post, whether what is being proposed is an expansion of approaches in...

The other night I was with friends, enjoying a relaxing evening of Chinese takeout and a wine that was far too expensive to go with it, while we started watching favorite YouTube videos. One of them is Ricky Gervais’ take on Noah’s Ark

Marilynne Robinson From Bookforum: In her novels and in her nonfiction essays, Marilynne Robinson‘s questions are always roughly the same: Who are we, and where did we come from? The first is a matter of metaphysics, the second of history. At least since the publication of her first collection...

Theories of workplace control typically have little to say about freedom. The workplace is often understood as a totalizing environment, saturated with obvious and subtle forms of coercion, so the struggle for freedom is best confined to realm of leisure, or more typically, left off the agenda entirely.

Jaques Derrida From Notre Dame Philosophical Review: Geoffrey Bennington’s Not Half No End, a volume of essays all written, with the exception of one, after Jacques Derrida‘s death in October 2004, is “profoundly marked” by this death and attempts “to go on thinking in its wake” (xi). Despite the difficulty,...

Shirin, Abbas Kiarostami, 2008 by Cain Todd Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, by C. Mole, D. Smithies, W. Wu (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Are you paying attention to this? William James, the oft-called father of modern psychology, famously said that everyone knows what attention is, so if...

by Susan James In which it is claimed that the practice of drawing can lead two thinkers centuries apart into a new symbiosis opening the way to political transformation. But what kind of transformation? Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger, Verso, 2011. 167pp. From A to X. A Story in...

If evil is inevitable for human beings, then God is held responsible for it and theodicy is doomed to fail...

Many people believe, like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God’s commands, then anything would be permitted...

by Justin E. H. Smith I will certainly not be the first to find it interesting that some languages do not allow for a distinction between things and stuff. In Latin for example there is only res, a word that abounds with ambiguities, though some more easily soluble than...

From the mid-twentieth century on Murdoch argued that modern philosophy, both in its analytic and French existentialist guises, is overly concerned with action and choice, operating with a naïve conception of the will and the idea of a liberal freely choosing agent.

From The Chronicle Review: Bless the American university, that exemplar of pluralism. Was it a playful University of Pennsylvania scheduler who managed to assign to the same all-purpose Houston Hall over a few days in October both the annual good-vibes Penn Family Weekend and “Critical Refusals: The International Herbert...

Sacrifice of Isaac, Rembrant, 1635 From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: One of the most valuable aspects of Mulder’s book is the reflection it promotes on the possible conversation between Kierkegaard and St. Thomas Aquinas. In chapter 2, for example, in a discussion of Fear and Trembling, Mulder argues that...

We do not ordinarily associate political theology or Carl Schmitt with freedom. Indeed, we are more likely to think that liberal political theory focuses on freedom, while political theology focuses on the authority of sectarian beliefs.

Recently, I have hosted a roundtable discussion on the science and philosophy of free will. The idea was to have a serious discussion about the various concepts of free will, as well as what exactly neuroscience can tell us about them.

If one subtracts the beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana from Buddhism, what remains is a philosophy that should be attractive to contemporary analytic philosophers...