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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

This piece explores the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how our relationship to the world and to ourselves is shaped by our interactions with primordial others. "Primordial otherness"...

In my exploration of US-American individualism, one of my early realizations was that my own sense of my own individualism is permeated with post-World War II existentialist ideas of the invention of...

Epicurus’ tetrapharmakon, or remedies for being at peace, is comprised of four maxims, as follows: 1. Don’t Fear God Epicurus believed that whatever entity created the cosmos, it could not possibly...

> But, I would argue that much of what actually characterizes everyday life — the creative moments arising out of artful improvisation on the spur of the moment — will still continue to be opaque to...

This piece was originally based on a thread of tweets that I wrote while viewing Travis Ross’ Youtube lecture entitled: Early 19th-Century Philosophy: German Idealism and its Reception. The sound...

In the course of giving his account of intersubjectivity (or the Being-with others of Mitsein), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) comments on two kinds of concern for the other — a leaping in for and a...

You might already know this: Philosophy comes from two Greek words — love (philia) and wisdom (sophia) — that translate to “love of wisdom.” The first precept of wisdom is knowing that you don’t know...