Philosophy & Law

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Photo: North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy)

Emerson’s Scepticism

Michael Ledger-Lomas

26 September 2024

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

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On Reichenau Island

Irina Dumitrescu

26 September 2024

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 . . .

At the 6 January trials

Linda Kinstler

26 September 2024

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 . . .

Fanon’s Contradictions

T.J. Clark

26 September 2024

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 . . .

On the Rule of Law

Frederick Wilmot-Smith

12 September 2024

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 . . .

Bantu in the Bathroom

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2015

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.

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The Adulteress Wife: Beauvoir Misrepresented

Toril Moi, 11 February 2010

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...

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Where is my mind?

Jerry Fodor, 12 February 2009

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...

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Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: Richard Dawkins

Terry Eagleton, 19 October 2006

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....

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No, it’s not anti-semitic: the right to criticise Israel

Judith Butler, 21 August 2003

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...

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You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife: Hardt and Negri’s Empire

Malcolm Bull, 4 October 2001

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...

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Why anything? Why this?

Derek Parfit, 22 January 1998

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.

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Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 4 December 1986

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...

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The Contingency of Language

Richard Rorty, 17 April 1986

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...

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Trivialised to Death: Reading Genesis

James Butler, 15 August 2024

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...

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I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Sophie Lewis, 1 August 2024

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...

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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...

Read more about A Tove on the Table: Versions of Wittgenstein

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...

Read more about Tillosophy: What about consciousness?

Wild Resistance: Adorno's Aesthetics

Owen Hatherley, 6 June 2024

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...

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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.

Read more about Slow Waltz: Trouble with the Troubles Act

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...

Read more about A Little of This Honey: What was the ghetto?

Trickes of the Clergye: Atheistical Thoughts

Alexandra Walsham, 25 April 2024

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...

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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...

Read more about A Comet that Bodes Mischief: Women in Philosophy

Breaking Point: Militant Constitutionalism

Martin Loughlin, 25 April 2024

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. 

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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...

Read more about Eye to the Keyhole: Pratt and Smith

The Call of the Weird: Last Gasp Apparitions

Michael Ledger-Lomas, 4 April 2024

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...

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Short Cuts: No Safe Routes

Frances Webber, 4 April 2024

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...

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Seeds of What Ought to Be: Hegel gets real

Terry Eagleton, 22 February 2024

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...

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Our Way of Proceeding: Jesuit Methods

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 22 February 2024

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...

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Multiplying Marys: On Mary Magdalene

Marina Warner, 22 February 2024

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,...

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Short Cuts: Corrupt Cops

Matt Foot, 8 February 2024

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.

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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...

Read more about Like a Top Hat: Morality without the Metaphysics

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