philopapers

Katharine Jenkins, Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, Oxford University Press, 2023, 268pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780197666784. Reviewed by Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire Katharine Jenkins has artfully stitched together a radically pluralist account of human social kinds using materials drawn from recent work in analytic feminist metaphysics. If the reader is interested in …

Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality Read More »

Review of Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class WarCasey Williams The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains impossible to shake the feeling that, as Matthew T. Huber puts it, ‘the climate movement is losing’ in both the …

Climate struggle Read More »

Roger Caldwell considers the quest of anthropologists. When the young Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), then a bored teacher of philosophy in Paris, received an offer to work in Brazil, he embraced the opportunity to remake himself as an anthropologist, conducting fieldwork among the remote tribes of the Mato Grosso. He thus exchanged what he saw as ‘the …

In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology by Lucy Moore Read More »

Chad Trainer hunts for a lost thinker. In the mid-fourth century BCE, Athens was between its peak as an imperial power and its decline into one more of Alexander the Great’s colonies. The prosperity of Athens’ Periclean age was a century in the past, and had been followed by a twenty-five years war with Sparta, resulting …

Looking for Theophrastus by Laura Beatty Read More »

Ian James Kidd responds to rejections of humanity. Adam Kirsch is an American poet, biographer, literary critic, a faculty member at Columbia University, and a widely-published public intellectual. The Revolt Against Humanity (2022) appears in the Columbia Global Reports series of well-produced, novella-length essays on contemporary political and cultural themes. The theme of this book is the dispiriting …

The Revolt Against Humanity by Adam Kirsch Read More »

Elaine Coburn navigates differences. How do we navigate cultural differences in multicultural societies? This question is the subject of heated public debates. What clothing is appropriate for a public swimming pool, say, or for swearing-in during a citizenship ceremony? Should publicly-funded schools give instruction promoting just one religion? How should the state adjudicate among citizens who …

Debating Multiculturalism: Should There Be Minority Rights? by Peter Balint & Patti Tamara Lenard Read More »

Review of Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical RecountingNasrin Olla Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or the progression of spirit, the idea that the whole world could …

Frames of modernity Read More »

Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Climate of History in a Planetary AgeRegan Burles The bright red time ball atop Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich rises halfway up its mast each day at 12:55 p.m., to the top of the mast at 12:58 p.m., and drops suddenly to the bottom at exactly 1:00 p.m. …

Earth systems Read More »

Review of Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the WorldDaniel Fraser Willem Styfhals’ new book offers a conceptual history of Gnosticism within a deceptively narrow discursive field. Though Gnosticism re-emerged and become a relatively widespread term in German thought from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, gaining particular prominence in the interwar period, Styfhals …

God’s away Read More »

Review of Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics Isabel Jacobs Since Antiquity, the sun has been tied up with earthly and divine authority. The solar god Sūrya, a Hindu deity, was worshipped in sun temples across India. In the fourth century, under Roman Emperor Julian’s rule, the ancient Helios, like Sūrya depicted with a radiant crown and …

Sunstruck Read More »