Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die? These questions sound like […]
In 2021, Kohei Saito’s Capital in the Anthropocene became a publishing sensation in Japan, eventually selling more than half a million copies. That astonishing achievement becomes even more extraordinary when one considers that Saito, an academic at the University of Tokyo, has for some years been rearticulating materialist philosophy based on a close reading of Karl Marx’s
The story of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his posthumous reception almost reads like the plot of an airport spy thriller. Heidegger rose to global fame with Being and Time (1927). This work, which shaped philosophical existentialism, claimed Western culture had lost touch with what he portentously called the “meaning of Being”. We have become too preoccupied
As utopian oases dry up, a desert of banality, and bewilderment spreads … – Jürgen Habermas (1986) The last few years have been truly catastrophic. One might easily argue that, during “The COVID Years”, we have witnessed more dramatic social and political change than at any time since 1939-1945. In terms of its scale and
Recent debates around transgender people and sexual diversity have been marked by essentialism, a profoundly conservative mindset with deep links to religious and metaphysical dogmatism. It is a stance through which conservative thinkers seek certainty in a world of change and fluidity. Essentialism comprises three key ideas. First, there is the idea that nature is