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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.
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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).
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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 you are reading this sentence right now then not only are you paying attention to it, but you should know that that is exactly what you’re doing.
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In Bento’s Sketchbook, John Berger interweaves his own drawings, reflections and narratives with quotations from Spinoza’s Ethics. A picture of a Japanese brush accompanies a poignant story about a Cambodian painter whom Berger gets to know at his local swimming pool, and is juxtaposed with Spinoza’s discussion of the way we experience events that are comparatively far in the past or future.
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A philosophical theodicy aims at establishing the responsibility for evil in the world: if evil is inevitable for human beings, then God, the absolute and only creator of the world, is held responsible for it, and theodicy is doomed to fail.
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Many people believe, like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God’s commands, then anything would be permitted. From Plato onwards however, the philosophical tradition has frequently questioned the idea of a religious foundation for ethics.
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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 others.
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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
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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 Marcuse Society's Fourth Biennial Conference"?
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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.
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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.
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Recently, I have hosted a roundtable discussion on the science and philosophy of free will (full video here), where the panelists were Hakwan Lau from Columbia University, Alfred Mele from Florida State University, Jesse Prinz, a colleague of mine at the City University of New York, and Adina Roskies from Dartmouth College. 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.
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In 2000, I was part of a small team of philosophers and Buddhist adepts invited to spend a few days in Dharamsala, India talking with the 14th Dalai Lama on the topic of destructive emotions. Several prominent neuroscientists attending the meetings were hatching ways to study the effects of Buddhist meditation.
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If a character born with every perfection is a poor premise for a story, then a God who is almighty, omniscient and eternal is even worse.
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I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time.
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I’m heading toward language, imaginary objects, and the cognition of ontology. But I’m not ready to go there, not yet. There’s some preliminary hemming and hawing I want to do, so bracketing, as it were.
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I met Castro in 2006 after receiving an honorary degree from the Academy of Fine Arts of Cuba. It was a beautiful meeting in his office for over three hours on a Sunday afternoon. We talked about a variety of subjects: the Cuban revolution, Khrushchev, the EU parliament, G. W. Bush, the educational system, and so on.
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In 1923, the British House of Commons had what was termed "a great debate": "Socialism or Capitalism: Which?" Not so long ago, books were regularly published on this thorny topic; but now, even on the left, enthusiasm for raising the issue has waned.
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Nobody wants to be treated badly or to feel inferior. Yet, it is not uncommon for everyone to experience a violation of that dignity on a daily basis. It happens everywhere humans come in contact with one another: dignity violations abound, with our intimate partners and families, in our communities, schools, in the business world, and in our relationships at the international level.
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To destroy an object is to reduce that object to mere appearance. Somehow a weapon of some kind is inserted into the rift between essence and appearance and translates the object so radically that the rift collapses.
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The origins of A Philosophical Retrospective – Facts, Values and Jewish Identity lie in a much more ambitious project, one of looking back on all that I have written over the years on the topics which have been of most concern to me with a view to seeing how far I do or do not still agree with myself, and if not, why not.
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It is worthwhile to try to recover a tradition of thinking about justice which, since the eighteenth century, has largely disappeared from view.
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Many philosophers consider the era of “modern” philosophy to begin with René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). In these works, Descartes aims to ground human knowledge of the external, material world.
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For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation
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by Charles LaPorte
If the Bible was best viewed as poetry, many felt, modern poetry could also come to serve a cultural role like that traditionally held by scripture. In this context, it should surprise us little to see Robert Browning addressed by his admirers as God’s very mouthpiece, or Alfred Tennyson spoken of as a veritable prophet.
by Rex Veeder
As a student of rhetoric, I was introduced to Marshall McLuhan in one or two classes during the 60s and 70s but the introduction was brief – more like having a family member introduce you to an uncle from Canada who, although he was family, somehow didn’t fit in. He was inappropriate. 
by Nico Slate
Connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Montgomery Story comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
by Leslie Paul Thiele
We are in the midst of an extinction crisis that rivals any in the last 65 million years. And we are altering the planet’s climate. But as we begin to accept the burden of responsibility for our actions, we are also reinforcing a false image of our species. 
by Philip Kitcher
It may seem that treating ethics as a human phenomenon, as a work-in-progress, undermines its authority. Without absolute commands, is everything permitted? Why, if the ethical maxims that currently govern our lives have emerged in this way, should we obey them? To say that ethics is founded in the command of God – or the dictates of Reason, for that matter – doesn’t help. 
by Tamar Aylat-Yaguri
It would be a contradiction to claim that both man and God could be simultaneously right and just. Either God is in the wrong (and there is no theodicy) or man is in the wrong, always in the wrong, and there is theodicy. 
by Keith and Orrin Pilkey
If the vast majority of scientists believe that humans are directly contributing to climate change, then why do polls show that fewer Americans today see global warming as a serious threat than they did two years ago? This public opinion phenomenon is directly attributable to groups motivated to misinform the public. 
by Nicholas Rombes
The vague commune in Martha Marcy May Marlene exists as a sort of unfulfilled dream. As with the other Occupy Zeitgeist films, the deceptively shambling narrative structure hints at a fantasy of disorder, the disorder of the natural world in the heart of a city, a desire not to dismantle the dominant social structures, but to circumvent it altogether. 
by John Beverley
There are many, and often deep, differences among the new governments of the left in Latin America, but in my opinion they do not resolve themselves into a neat dichotomy, which has the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is an important emerging contradiction in the Pink Tide, but it is one within the governments of the Tide rather than between them. 
by Junko Kitanaka
Suicide has long been a site of conceptual struggle for psychiatrists, who have encountered resistance from lay Japanese holding on to the cultural notion of suicide as a morally positive act of self-determination, carried out at times as a protest against social injustice. 
by Jonathan Lear
On the face of it, a conception does not seem the sort of thing it is easy to lose. If we think of our life with concepts in terms of our ways of going on, categorizing and thinking about the phenomena in the world, including ourselves, then it makes sense that certain concepts might lose their viability for us, and thus fall out of use.
by James Joyce
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. Most Popular
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