Willie Thompson tries to see Sartre through the eyes of the person who knew him best. In Erica Jong’s best-selling novel of the seventies, Fear of Flying, two characters amuse themselves by telling a third that they’re Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, their acquaintance being vaguely conscious that these are names he ought to …
Benedict O’Donohoe introduces our Sartre centenary issue. The 21st June 2005 was an auspicious date – the summer solstice, the tipping point of Gemini into Cancer, and the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre. And on 15th April 1980 – just 25 years ago – Sartre died. These two dates are worthy of note …
John Goff wonders what the real cost of privacy is in the modern world. In recent years, worries about privacy have increased markedly. Many people have become aware that they are the objects of an increasingly intensive, and not necessarily benign, process of commercial and political information gathering. Concerns about the surveillance of our movements …
Peter Rickman tells us why it isn’t. I was slightly taken aback when I heard a speaker at a psychology lecture meeting claiming confidently that psychology was a science. Of course, if we define science broadly, as the systematic search for knowledge, psychology would qualify for that label. But it is not terminology that is …
Mihail Evans studies art to understand politics. The work of Frank Ankersmit on representation and democracy is surprisingly little known even among academics working in political theory. At the end of the 1990s, already one of the most eminent figures globally in the philosophy of history, this professor at the University of Groningen in the …
Matt Qvortrup argues that Aristotle’s political philosophy is surprisingly modern. The son of a doctor, Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Macedonia in the year 384 BC, and was educated at Plato’s Academy. When his mentor Plato died in 347 BC, the Macedonian went home and became the tutor of Alexander, the …
Aristotle’s Philosophy of Equality, Peace, & Democracy Read More »
Sam Woolfe says that we’re deluding our selves. In our day-to-day lives, it always appears that there is an I who is thinking, perceiving, and interacting with the world. Even the language we use assumes that there is a self – a distinct conscious entity: when we talk to each other we say, ‘I think…’, …
Chris Durante asks himself just what makes him the person he used to be. Stepping into a park I had frequented as a little boy, memories of my childhood began to flood my mind, each one a rich story of a distant past. As I continued to reminisce, each story flowed into the next, and …
Tim Delaney foresees five threats to sustaining global civilization. For centuries, social thinkers have pondered whether the Earth’s carrying capacity is being compromised by human overpopulation. For example, in his An Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus claimed that the world’s population was growing too quickly in proportion to the growth in …
Sándor Szegláb decodes the hidden message of the Tractatus. The statements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus start with index numbers. It is taken for granted that this indexing is used in such a way that 1.1 is a comment on or elaboration of 1, 1.11 and 1.12 comment on 1.1, and so forth. With Wittgenstein, …