Ed Simon: Still Nervous about Harold Bloom

One of Kafka’s posthumously published fragments concerns a philosopher whose sole activity, as a philosopher, consists in giving chase to a child’s toy.

What exactly does it mean that the Bible has a story where the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient Creator of the universe gets into a wrestling match...

Clare Hemmings is one of the most innovative and original voices in contemporary feminist theory. Her work cuts across disciplinary boundaries and is largely concerned with an ongoing and wide-ranging critical reflection on the production of ‘feminist theory’ as a field.

Existentialism has a reputation for being angst-ridden and gloomy mostly because of its emphasis on pondering the meaninglessness of existence, but two of the best-known existentialists knew how to have fun in the face of absurdity.

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Pascal Chabot’s treatise Global Burnout broadly overlaps with Petersen’s article: ‘Burnout is a disease of civilization’...

At the eastern edge of the city of Pittsburgh, where neighborhoods lined with red and pin oak, birch and elm start to merge into the forested thicket...

When, according to Socrates, was Mladić more miserable? When he committed genocide and over a long period of time was not arrested, convicted, or punished..

What remains for us now of Hegel, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and the "philosophy of difference"? In the 1980s, as more and more works by Derrida and Deleuze were translated into English

The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’...

If existentialism did have an influence on popular social movements, how would we know? An even bigger question looms. What counts as an idea?

Seventy-five years ago, and more than 150,000 men would land on the Normandy coast, arriving on very French beaches assigned the very American names of Utah and Omaha

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.