A thinker with wide-ranging interests, Robert Nozick was one of the most important and influential political philosophers, along with John Rawls, in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and most celebrated book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), produced, along with his Harvard colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), the revival of the discipline …
Maria daVenza Tillmanns argues that we need to be holistic in our approach to solving complex problems. In this article I would like to highlight a distinction between two essentially different orientations of thinking. One looks from the inside out, the other from the outside in. To focus from the inside out is to start …
Arnold Zuboff untangles the problems of a particular type of bad thinking. Sometimes, on learning that I am a philosopher, a non-philosopher who has gained the impression that it is difficult to get agreement in philosophy will tease me with the idea that philosophy can never definitely establish anything. I then like to point out …
Even his best friends thought he was a Nazi, so why should we pay any further attention to Heidegger’s philosophical writings? We asked a selection of Heidegger scholars this question: “Does Martin Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi Party and his anti-Semitism, as evident in the recently published Black Notebooks, make a difference to how we …
Mary Midgley says that branches of knowledge are like maps – each answers a different set of questions so they can’t necessarily all be ‘reduced’ to physics. Reductivism comes in two phases. First there is the monistic move where we explain a great range of things as only aspects of a single basic stuff. Thus, …
Richard Mason on a thinker who stood at the intersection of many histories and traditions. Why read Spinoza? He is supposed to be one of the Great Philosophers, isn’t he? Certainly, he is part of the routine syllabus, but a part which many students find easy to skip. If you face an exam on the …
Gary Cox asks, ‘is happiness a cigar called Hamlet?’, and other searching questions. I spent my formative years being told by advertisers that ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’. These celebrated cigar ads ran from 1966 until tobacco advertising was banned from UK television in 1991. Despite all I have read and written on the …
Shai Tubali considers the roots and implications of Arendt’s active philosophy. In 1964 German journalist Gunter Gaus interviewed Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) for his TV show Zur Person. The conversation began with a peculiar exchange: Gaus kept insisting on defining Arendt as a ‘philosopher’ while she kept gently pushing back the title. Gaus looked perplexed. Arendt …
Amee LaTour argues we should sometimes welcome being run aground by life. What do you want out of life? Happiness? Comfort? Security? Like many philosophers associated with existentialism, Martin Heidegger emphasizes the potential fruitfulness of varieties of experience quite contrary to these states, such as the discomfort and insecurity of becoming stranded. When we’re stranded, …
Colin Wilson explores the more provocative side of existentialism. In the following essay I propose to argue that Husserl’s phenomenology has been radically misunderstood by the majority of those who consider themselves his followers, particularly Sartre, and that the problem lies in their failure to grasp what Husserl meant by ‘intentionality’. Intentionality should not be …