philopapers

James Alexander finds Alain Badiou guilty of horrors but sometimes worth reading. It is always a pleasure to read a review by one established philosopher of another. In the Times Literary Supplement of 31 August 2012, Roger Scruton reviewed The Adventure of French Philosophy by Alain Badiou (b.1937). Badiou is one of those ‘New Left’ […]

Elad Uzan argues that although it may well be, this doesn’t necessarily justify a warlike response. In July 2020, then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden put Russia and others on notice. “If any foreign power recklessly chooses to interfere in our democracy”, he said, “I will not hesitate to respond as President to impose substantial and

Charlotte Curran tells us precisely why fat shaming is unethical. Fat people are perhaps the most openly stigmatized individuals in our society: there is data which suggests that weight stigma is more pervasive and intense than even racism and sexism. There is certainly a well-documented social and cultural bias against fat people, particularly in the

Psychiatrist Eva Cybulska provides a psychological interpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. “Even as ‘a philosopher’ I still did not express my essential thoughts (or ‘delusions’).”Friedrich Nietzsche, in a letter to Overbeck, April 1883 “Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus The influence of

An introduction by H. James Birx. “Let us assume that people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year 2000.”Nietzsche, 24 September 1886” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche has emerged as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, although both controversy and confusion surround his life and thought. He was born on 15

Nietzsche rejected all conventional morality but he wasn’t a nihilist – he called for a “re-evaluation of all values”. Alexander V. Razin describes the gulf separating him from that other great moralist, Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Nietzsche presented the world with a philosophy of life that called for a rigorous reevaluation of all values. His critical

Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and

Brian King wonders what there is about human minds that’s unique to us. There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that

Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it? If we found out next week that neuroscientists had conclusively demonstrated that free will does not exist and that our so-called ‘choices’ are purely the result of automatic brain functions, I think we would be right to take this news badly.

Frank S. Robinson ‘chooses’ to remind ‘us’ of problems some contemporary philosophers have with these central human concepts. In 2012, Sam Harris, one of the famed ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, published a book called Free Will, arguing that it doesn’t exist. He’s a neuroscientist, and he contends that the more science learns how our