philopapers

What’s in a name? Marnie Binder asks if it matters who’s writing, and other questions of authorship. “By certain manners of the spirit even great spirits betray that they come from the mob or semi-mob; it is above all the gait and stride of their thoughts that betray them; they cannot walk. There is something […]

Nancy Bunge considers Emerson as a philosopher, to show that he is a poet. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) not only made influential arguments for a distinctively American literature, his early admirers and students include Walt Whitman, generally considered America’s best poet, and Henry David Thoreau, who established American environmental literature with Walden. As a result,

Neil Lefebvre and Melissa Schehlein give an intuitive solution to the famous Liar Paradox. This Subtitle is False This article is about a well-known paradox that dates back to ancient times, known as the Liar Paradox, or sometimes, Epimenides’ Paradox. It can take many forms, but one of the most common is the following sentence:

Robert Davies applies some critical thinking to an old debate. The aim of this article is twofold. One of its purposes is to try and give some reasons why the laws that prohibit the use of cannabis are unjustified. To achieve this I will examine two common arguments put forward to justify why cannabis is

Part I: Design for a Superbeing. By Mike Alder. Long, long ago, before Philosophy Now was even a gleam in its editor’s eye, there were bright and lively-minded people around, just like you. People who liked new ideas, liked a bit of intellectual stimulation, enjoyed debate and discussion, people who liked to use their brains.

Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives? Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was

Nazenin Ruso explains where and why he agrees with Derrida’s approach to texts. Jacques Derrida was the best-known French philosopher of the 80s and 90s, yet many find it difficult to grasp his ideas. He asked complex philosophical questions about texts and textuality. He invented deconstructionism, which emphasizes the necessary incompleteness of texts. That is

Review of Seb Franklin, The Digitally DisposedMarc Kohlbry As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and the subsequent need for ‘algorithmic justice’. This consensus is perhaps distilled by Shalini Kantayya’s award-winning 2020 documentary Coded Bias, which tells the story of Joy Buolamwini,

Review of Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History Hannah Proctor The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken up temporary residence in a grand building made available by its

Review of Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation Gus Hewlett Simondon’s longest and most philosophically ambitious text has finally arrived in English, in a fine translation by Taylor Adkins. Individuation in light of notions of form and information was originally submitted in 1958 as Simondon’s thèse principale, alongside his thèse secondaire, On the mode of existence of