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 […]
What Price Privacy? Read More »
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
Aesthetic 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…’,
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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
The Five Horrorists Read More »
José Zalabardo investigates which problem Wittgenstein is trying to solve. For many contemporary interpreters of the Tractatus, its ultimate goal is not to answer philosophical questions or solve philosophical problems. Rather, Wittgenstein’s aim is therapeutic – to make his readers see that philosophy is not a legitimate pursuit: the problems are fictitious, the questions are
“The world is all that is the case” Read More »
Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess. This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Latin for ‘Logical-Philosophical Treatise’), the only book the Austrian philosopher published in his lifetime. Not the least astonishing fact about it is that, as we shall see, most
Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism Read More »
Matt Qvortrup argues that Marx still inspires those longing for a better world. In the beginning was the word, and Marx had a way with them like no other. Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a supreme stylist with a turn of phrase that few could match. Whatever one thinks of the political ideologies associated with
Karl Marx: Man & Mind Read More »
Noson Yanofsky tells us how to deal with contradictions and the limitations of reason that arise from them. We all have conflicting desires. We want to get promoted, but don’t want to work too hard. We would like to date both Betty and Veronica (or both Bob and Vernon). We desire to stay thin, but also
Resolving Paradoxes Read More »
Hugh Hunter unpacks the sources of Berkeley’s idealism. You will be familiar, in these days of inelegant travel, with the exercise of trying to fit everything you might plausibly need into a very small suitcase. It sometimes happens that there is one thing which frustrates the process, an object with awkward contours that ensure it
Berkeley’s Suitcase Read More »
Pleasure for the People! Katherine Power considers whether there should be more opiates for the masses (including opium?), but settles for nuts and seeds. Before anaesthesia, surgery used to be agony. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could have been anything but pleased when painless surgery was introduced in the mid-19th century. And yet, although
The End of Suffering Read More »