Would you still be you if you were born as a boy instead of a girl, or as a girl instead of a boy? That is, if your sex assignment were different that it was when you were born, would that change the...
Theodor Adorno, one of the foremost thinkers from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, made a lasting impact with his critiques of mass culture and the homogenization of society. In The Culture...
Sandra Lee Bartky would have been 90 years old this year, were she still alive. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 81 in her Michigan home. Her essay, "Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist...
In this example, I am your professor in this undergraduate Introduction To Philosophy. This is an experiment I did run in many of my classes. I would come out from behind the lectern holding a piece...
Etymology What exactly is the appeal of etymology? I am fascinated by tracking meanings down throughout the ages. You can see meaning accumulating, taking a turn, and evolving over time. Concepts get...
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Continuum, 1990. Adams explores the intersections of feminism, vegetarianism, and animal rights, arguing that...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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: 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...
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)...