Get Your Smart On
Why I think that we are being transitioned from a consumer economy to a creator economy
In Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, the dialectic is resolved when the Master realizes his dependence on the Slave, who produces the goods that maintain the Master’s life —mutual recognition becomes...
The Fear, Fantasy, and the Real Material Conditions The public conversation about Large Language Models (LLMs, collectively referred to as AI) has revolved around fears and fantasies as depicted in...
1. Rags To Reason "Rags to Reason" delves into existential themes, the interplay of art and ethics, and the relevance of classical philosophers like Aristotle and Sartre in modern contexts. The...
Relativism. Skepticism. Incommunicability. Nihilism. Death.
Philosophy is an extreme intellectual sport. We would like to believe that doing philosophy is only and always good, but doing philosophy can be extremely dangerous. Most obvious is the risk of...
The Story of Space: Elaborations of Void in Hellenistic Philosophy
Once we get to Modern Philosophy, concepts of space become more familiar and consequently feel more “real.” It is difficult for us to relate to space as a whirling receptacle steered by Goddesses; or...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads
Society Of The Spectacle is a seminal work written by Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International (SI for short), a radical avant-garde movement composed of artists, intellectuals, and...
The Story of Space: Aristotle’s Container View Of Space as Place and Extendable Limit
If you want to understand how change is possible in the simplest sense of movement from one place to another, you need an account of the space across which that thing moves. This is Aristotle’s...
The Story of Space: Plato’s Appropriation of Reproduction in the Timeaus and Beyond
In her classic “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Elizabeth Spellman shows us how Plato argues for the education of women alongside men, and for the inclusion of women in all social classes...
The Story of Space: The Strange Non-Being of Space and the Logic of Negation
Up to this point in this series, we have examined the first figuration of space as a receptacle of being that is (1) analogous to women’s bodies in reproduction, and (2) akin to Necessity in its...
The Story of Space: On Necessity, the Receptacle, and Spatial Receptivity In Plato’s Timaeus Plato’s Timaeus is a “cosmontology”: it purports to tell the story of the origins of all being(s), and it...
The Story of Space: The ontological journey from the Unlimited to the Void.
The Story of Space: Presocratic Roots This essay is the first in a series on the history of concepts of space in Western Philosophy. Here we discuss the mythical and ontological precursors to Plato’s...
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads
The essays collected under the title On Female Body Experience represent twenty years of work in feminist phenomenology by one of its chief practitioners, Iris Marion Young. These essays showcase...
One of the most important works in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prolific career, The Social Contract begins with a rejection of Hobbes’ premise that civil society begins with individuals relinquishing...
Pushing Off Of Aristotle Heidegger criticizes Aristotle’s study of beings in the Physics and Metaphysics because it assumes things/objects as the primary focus. Humans (subjects, more precisely)...
The problem of the Other in Continental European Philosophy as backdrop for understanding US-American individualism.
1. The Subject and its Other in Continental Philosophy In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of individualism is permeated with post-World...
Extended space versus the interval of negative space in art and representation.
Hans Hofmann, artist and philosopher, developed and wrote about how to create volume and depth on a two dimensional plane through the push and pull between colors and forms. Hofmann theorizes the...
In this second part on the Subject and its Other, I give an overview of Levinasian Ethics and explain how it shifts the discourse on the Other, and some feminist philosophers are listening in.
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): The Face-to-Face Encounter With The Other Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking on intersubjectivity and the Other begins from the rejection of previous models that don’t seem to...
Butler's first book lays the groundwork for her theory of gender performativity, the deconstruction of the sex/gender binary, and build upon Gayle Rubin's theory of compulsory heterosexuality.
A foundational text for feminist philosophy and queer theory, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity offers a collection of essays that develop a post-structuralist analysis of the...
If we can replicate the best aspects of philosophy outside of academia, philosophy will have been set free. And she wants to be free.
There was a recent flutter on Twitter about public philosophy, what it is and what counts as public philosophy. I opined that I didn’t think that you could be both a public philosopher and an...
Queer twenty years in the making (1990-2010). I wrote this in 2012, I wonder if it holds up, but be warned that this gets dark in the end.
Queer has the bad reputation of being undefinable, but we will nonetheless offer three or four ways of understanding “queer,” here organized from the most general to the most narrow.1 The most...