Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden.
‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.
At some point in the early sixth century, a well-born Irish monk arrived on Säckingen, a small island on the Rhine. Fridolin had already travelled through Gaul, discovered the relics of St Hilarius . . .
Acourt summons arrived in December, alerting me that I had been selected for ‘special jury service’. An accompanying letter explained that the trial would be held at the court for the District of . . .
Frantz Fanon is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War . . .
In November last year, the UK government’s signature policy on asylum seekers was judged unlawful by the Supreme Court. At various other points over the last twelve months, Israel’s Supreme Court . . .
Pistorius was surely not aware that when he insisted the person he shot in the bathroom was an intruder he was re-enacting one strand of his nation’s cruellest past.
In June 1946 Simone de Beauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn...
If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you. They...
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology....
Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in...
Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the...
It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists.
It was nice to be awoken on 12 November by the BBC informing us that the Queen’s Speech would announce measures ‘to strengthen the jury system’. It is, after all, a very ancient...
About two hundred years ago, the idea that A truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social...
Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden.
Writing about how (not) to stage a coup by Hilary Mantel, Thomas Jones, Perry Anderson, Patricia Beer, Christopher Hitchens, Ella George, Bruce Ackerman, Alexandra Reza, James Meek and John Perry.
Slavoj Žižek responds to criticisms of his piece for the LRB, ‘Resistance is Surrender’, and presents his views on violence.
Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.
David talks to writer and philosopher John Gray about pretty much everything, from the Corbyn cult to the craziness of cryogenics.
Philosopher Jonathan Rée unravels the story within Spinoza's knotty work of 17th century rationalism, the Ethics
Genesis, which narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days...
Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...
Many books include passages which, despite their authors’ best efforts, simply do not make sense. Wittgenstein may be involved in a mirror image of this: that is, the Tractatus may include many passages...
There is something of the handyman about Daniel Dennett’s approach to philosophy proper – a confidence that we can make progress on philosophical questions by getting a grip on the details, and an...
Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...
The Troubles Legacy Act has been unilaterally imposed by the UK. Almost everyone hates it. Northern Ireland’s largest political parties all oppose it, though not for entirely the same reasons.
Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...
In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the...
Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general...
Democracies implode when the authoritarian tendencies of the leaders of mainstream political parties are not reined in by constitutional mechanisms that are supposed to impose checks.
Mrs Berkshire went swiftly upstairs and put a bold eye to the keyhole. When she did, she saw that Pratt and Smith’s trousers were down. Later, in court, she confirmed that she had seen both men’s private...
It wasn’t a belief in the supernatural that marked someone out as insane, but the judgment of the authorities that this belief was held with harmful vehemence. One inmate who proclaimed himself to be...
The higher courts have always acquiesced to government ministers’ views of national security, but in Shamima Begum’s case the court appears to have given Sajid Javid carte blanche to conclude that...
For Hegel, the actual contains the possible, so that you can plunge into it with no fear of losing sight of a desirable alternative. You don’t need to tack some arbitrary utopian dimension onto what...
What was this Society for which Pope Paul III provided a charter? It was not a religious order, though it is often styled as such. Its members were neither monks nor friars. Its self-descriptor as a...
Devotees often exult in the stripping of her beauty and her wealth; she is imagined as a woman of substance, who owned property in Magdala (hence her name), and when she repents and gives all this up,...
I have spent 25 years working as a criminal defence lawyer and have yet to find anyone who knows of a single police officer being convicted for their role in a wrongful conviction.
Alasdair MacIntyre drew a conclusion he has stuck to ever since: that philosophy takes time. Instead of choosing an opinion that appeals to you and forsaking all others, you need to take on different arguments...
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