62 posts
In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized when it is relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to politicize work in much the same ways that feminists have...
In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized by being relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to re-politicize work, much like feminists politicized the...
In the first part of this series, we explored how both work and marriage are framed as private, individual matters, even though the state actively structures and enforces both arrangements. We’re...
Kathi Weeks begins The Problem with Work with this brilliant insight that work and marriage are analogous social institutions. Much of her analysis hangs on this analogy, which extends across the...
This session details the meticulous process of creating a syllabus for a six-week, one-credit online course titled “Philosophy of Work and Leisure” at Smarties University. The course, structured with...
I was really inspired by ’s post for autodidacts, “How to Create Your Own University Course to Teach Yourself Almost Anything,” where Settecase shows readers how to create a course on any topic, then...
--- ALL YOUR FAVORITE SUBSTACK PHILOSOPHERS AND HUMANISTS IN ONE COMMON FEED. BEHOLD All THE TRUTH, GOODNESS, AND BEAUTY! 📣 Announcing Substack Philosophers’ Alliance (in Beta) This is like a...
1. Don’t Watch This… No Need 2. Tilt-tillating Transcript Bits “GRANDAD: …it's good for many many things it's going to be magnificent in healthcare and education and more or less any industry that...
How can I understand you, what you are feeling and thinking? Why you do the things you do? You are that part of my experience that is not me, and you have the power to affect our shared world. Even...
--- About six months ago, there was a story making the rounds about an AI companion doll named Moxie that was going to be turned off because the company that made it, Embodied, Inc., went bankrupt...
A deliberate and strategic effort to redefine and attack empathy has been underway for nearly twenty years. What might initially appear to be isolated critiques of empathy, upon closer examination...
--- Let's play the associations game. I say technology, you say? AI, robots, smart phones, computers? In another era, it might have been a factory, the steam engine, railroads, coal energy. Even...
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis argues that we’re witnessing a power struggle between traditional industrial capitalists and a new elite of tech oligarchs who accumulate...
--- Imagine you are sitting in a hotel conference room and all of a sudden the lights go out. You feel a lot of movement around you, maybe someone brushes past you quickly with a whoosh. When the...
--- This piece picks up where “The Christian Right’s Anti-Empathy Crusade I” leaves off. You might want to read that first. Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy (2024) Allie Beth Stuckey is a conservative...
--- This piece examines how Paul Bloom, in his book Against Empathy, uses a rhetorical strategy called dissociation to cut a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy, to disparage...
--- Prior in this Empathy series: --- Today, I’d like to begin to tell you the story of how those on the religious right (Christian, Evangelical, Nationalists) have mounted the war on empathy over...
I first encountered Donna Haraway's “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a feminist epistemologies seminar in the early 1990s. At that time, we felt that we were on the cusp of something new, and her writing...
I’ve scheduled a live for this Wednesday, April 2 at 1pm EST, on Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” You can easily find a copy of this text online, and above I’ve...
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant yet deeply unsettling account of the psychological and social effects of colonization on oppressed peoples. Born in Martinique and trained as a...
--- Mindscaping Philosophy Journal Prompt: Imagine a world where experiences serve as currency that you can trade with others. Once traded, these experiences leave your memory completely. Which...
“Across nations and cultures, entire words and ideas are missing or deprived of the weight they deserve. The presence of absence is just as powerful as the spread of misinformation or false news....
Thank you for those of you who made it to this Philosophy Publics Unplugged live. Join me for the next live on Wednesdays at 12noon EST. In this episode, we delve into the concept of intuition and...
Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. --- Transcript: Hello everyone. Welcome, welcome. This is our first live. I am Mona Mona. I...
A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (the first is Anti-Oedipus) by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This is a very...
In What Are Friends For? (1993), Marilyn Friedman offers an analysis of friendship in its moral, epistemological, and political dimensions. Her work is clear and analytic, and particularly useful for...
"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through." — Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference In An Ethics of Sexual Difference...
It is 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft has just published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a precursor text for a first wave of feminism that will not begin for at least another fifty years.1 Her...
If I were to ask you, do you know how to read? You would probably say, “Oh, yes, of course, I’ve been reading since grade school. I’m a very confident reader!” But the thing is, if it is philosophy...
I recently announced in our subscriber chat that I would trade one critique for a monthly subscription (see above). It is my way to make Philosophy Publics accessible as I begin to paywall some...
We have watched the price of food rise over the past few years, and so many of us have had to ask ourselves if we can afford our usual groceries. The price we pay for shelter is becoming prohibitive,...
In our subscriber chat, many of you shared some significant challenges of being human right now: feelings of isolation; information overload; difficulties in building community; and misanthropic...
In our subscriber chat I asked y’all what you thought was the single most challenging aspect of being human right now, and your answers really capture where we are in this moment. I responded to some...
Philosophy is preparation for death, so said Socrates, the Greek philosopher par excellence, a martyr to the cause, executed by the state in BC for corrupting the youth. According to his pupil Plato,...
In "Why Empathy Makes Us Cruel & Irrational," author characterizes empathy as an emotionally transmitted disease, a virus, and as a parasite. He claims that empathy debilitates thought, makes us...
> “Arguing has little to do with persuasion; it is an agonistic contest of wills and wits. …that is not quite persuasion, and so we may now want to ask: What is persuasion, really? Does it even...
1. Nobody understands Nietzsche (except me) by Sam Kriss recounts his adolescent fascination with Nietzsche, initially driven by a Gnostic yearning for intellectual escape from the perceived...
> “Then I want to take up the practice [of world-traveling] as a horizontal practice of resistance to two related injunctions: the injunction for the oppressed to have our gazes fixed on the...
Everywhere we look, women are divided. The perception that a majority of Anglo-American women voted for the Trump ticket in the recent elections has created a rift between white and other women, a...
In this old thinkPhilosophy podcast from 2018, I explore Jean-Paul Sartre's essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” a key introduction to existentialist philosophy. Sartre argues that existentialism’s...
I recently posted what I thought was a rather strange question to Notes: > “This is going to sound like a strange question, but what does thinking feel like, for you? If you had to describe it,...
Of Grammatology established Jacques Derrida as a major figure in contemporary philosophy and introduced both différance and deconstruction. This work includes two key early essays by Derrida: “The...
I’ll cut to the chase. Here is a list of changes we can expect, and since I didn’t want to give you this scary list without actionables, below are some quick ideas for how you can prepare to weather...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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"...
> 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...
In a recent post at The Elysian Substack entitled “Could AI make us wise?,” Elle Grffin (@ellegriffin) suggests that training an AI to curate the best content for us, based on our values, could lead...
Questioner: I've been feeling a bit lost lately. I've faced some hard challenges that make me question everything and I don’t know if my reactions and opinions are actually mine. I think that growing...
The pivotal moment in G.W. Friedrich Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic occurs when a slave, engaged in the work of making things for the master's consumption, sees himself1 in those things and there...
Question: "Would you rather live paycheck to paycheck in a big lively city or comfortably paid in a remote and isolated village? I have the opportunity of working as a physiotherapist in a village...
In the early 1990s, I became infatuated with something called French Feminism. Toril Moi's book Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Ty (1985) had introduced Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and...
1. Dogs as Symbols of Virtue In Ancient Worlds Diogenes of Sinope (404 BC - 323 BC), a prominent figure in Greek philosophy and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy, famously used the dog as a...
The following examples are taken from either historical or currently existing movements and initiatives. While they may not be flawless, they provide us with a tangible glimpse into what is already...
Exegesis of “Self-Consciousness” and the Master/Slave Dialectic Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is a seminal work in German Idealism that charts the development of human...