One aspect of Nietzsche’s political thought of note is the strong tendency to replace politics with culture as the source of value. Some sense of cultural value as the human goal, or at least a major aspect of flourishing humanity, or some flourishing group of humans, goes back to The Birth of Tragedy. However, at…

There is some exaggeration in referring to the death of Stoicism, of course its ethics (which is what concerns us here) is still of interest and has even had a revival, popular and academic in recent years. Nevertheless there really was a death of Stoicism in that the influence  it had from its Hellenistic and…

The idea of a republic has been very tied up from the beginning with the idea of loss, even when linked with the hope for a new beginning. The first great political text of republican political theory may be the Funeral Oration of Pericles as reported (invented?) by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War, where the defence…

Leo Kadanoff making an argument directed at Bob Wald using the example of Dumb Holes that Radin Dardashti, Karim Thebault and I had just presented on. I wonder if Wald and Kadanoff have such rich conversations very often in the hallways of their own department. Who says philosophers and scientists can't engage with each other? (And…

The following is a guest post by Shelley Tremain:   As deadlines for philosophy faculty positions approach and pass, members of search committees should bear in mind how structural, institutional, disciplinary, material, and other factors have marginalized many philosophers, reproducing the profession and discipline as homogeneous and conformist along axes of power such as disability, race, sexuality, nationality,…

Discussions of European identity, and the history mostly revolve round two points of reference. One goes back to the origin of modern usage of Europe and European in the eight century around the struggle between Christian Franks and Muslim Moors, and then round the Frankish king Charlemagne who received the title of Emperor of the Romans,…

This is a guest post by Mitchell Aboulafia.  It's a bit long, but it's worth reading in its entirety.  I don't necessarily endorse any particular part of it, but I think it makes some excellent points, especially about lack of transparency.  This feature in particular is, in my view, not tolerable given the enormous influence the…

Posted on Facebook and reposted here with his consent and encouragement (if I understand correctly)   Dear Berit, Thanks for this invitation. While the interest in my opinion about my colleagues is flattering, I don't feel able to participate, for three reasons.   First, as I think you know, I have signed on to the…

I don't think I've got anything surprising to say for anyone whose read Enlightenment texts concerned with ethics texts at all attentively, at least in terms of pointing out what is obviously there, but what I'm discussing as far as I can see is underplayed in most discussion, and certainly in the 'average understanding' that…

Here at the Rotman conference on Climate Science, Paul Edwards is talking about "knowledge infrastructures" and how the production of knowledge has radically changed over the last 20 years from a much more individualistic enterprise, with pyramids of expertise, peer review, etc to a much more distributed model.   He mentioned this popular book Too…