Ed Simon: D-Day 75 Years Later

In a world where the whole is beyond coherent representation (as Benjamin believed it to be) we are left with fragments...

Trying to get a point across in public writing, whether established or clickbait media, with just the nuance, force, and connotations you intend, is like trying to perform a violin solo underwater...

Sketch, Léon Cogniet, 1870 by M. Munro No agreement exists as to the possibility of defining negation, as to its logical status, function, and meaning, as to its field of applicability. “The mystery of negation: This is not how things are, and yet we can say how things are...

From whence did the interrogative arise? In what pool of primordial muck could the first question have been asked?

In 1784 Immanuel Kant described humanity as being in a state of immaturity, which to Kant is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another”

How enlightened was the Enlightenment? Not a few critics have seen it as profoundly benighted. For some, it was a seedbed for modern racism and imperialism; the light in the Enlightenment, one recent scholar has suggested, essentially meant “white.”

If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today, what would he think of our times? “The nations are again drawing away from one another and long to tear one another to pieces”...

I came to philosophy bursting with things to say. Somewhere along the way, that changed...

At the risk of leaving in a car for dinner in the city and ending up in Rome, the next day, after having rolled all night, because of a change of mind.

The most radical thinker of the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), is not exactly a forgotten man, though he has been long overshadowed by his contemporaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

It is the nature of Marie Kondo's attraction to Westerners that gives me pause. This registers most powerfully for me when...

“Thinking,” Paul de Man is reported to have said, “is finding a good quotation.”

The following is ascribed to the 20th Century Polish mathematician Stefan Banach. "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems...

In many ways, gender — much like religion — is at best imaginary, at worse, nonsense.

Philosophy undoubtedly has something to do with the experience of silence – that much is clear. What’s not at all clear, however...

Is there any way to intervene usefully or meaningfully in public debate, in what the extremely online Twitter users are with gleeful irony calling the ‘discourse’ of the present moment?

What forms does living labour take, today, outside of the factory? In an Argentinian context, this question has grown in importance ever since the eruption of movements of unemployed workers at the beginning of this century.

All his life, Friedrich Nietzsche hated being photographed. Execution “by the one-eyed Cyclops,” he called it.

In the five years since I moved to Paris as an American philosopher, my disdain for what Americans know as ‘French theory’ has only deepened...