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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Andrew Royle introduces Heidegger’s key ideas from his classic Being and Time, showing how they lead towards his concept of Being-towards-death. This article considers aspects of the philosophy of the German phenomenologist/existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), finally applying them in the context of bereavement. As Heidegger’s writings are filled with many highly technical terms, I’ll provide …
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 …
Bob James sees similarities in the two writers’ dark perceptions of industrialisation. In December 1941, William Faulkner mailed his New York publisher the fourth and final part of a forty-thousand-word short story from his home in Mississippi. In a separate note, Faulkner apologized to the publisher for being late with the manuscript, but said “there …
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, …
Slavoj Žižek says Hegel doesn’t need to be a prophet to point us to a better tomorrow. The claim I want to defend is that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look. As he says towards the end of the …
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 …