The phrase “I think, therefore I am” or “Cogito ergo sum” might make Descartes the most-quoted philosopher of the last 400 years. But what’s the role of other people in the self? Does the self really come from one person’s solitary mind—or do the people around us inform who we refer to when we use the word “I”?
Are humans “genetically programmed” towards monogamy? Does monogamy ensure that offspring are cared for? What bearing does this have on the ethics of cheating in a romantic relationship? And how do we account for polyamory?
Alain Badiou, one of France’s premiere philosophers and public intellectuals, recently wrote a column in Le…
In 1992, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama became famous for his provocative and much-criticized claim that history had ended. In a recent article in Aeon, Paul Sagar argues that Fukuyama more accurately predicted that societies may fall back into history, and way from liberal democracy.
What happens when we view bodybuilding through a Marxist lens? Is bodybuilding a unique form of labor, that creates a particular sense of fulfillment? When you pump iron, do the fruits of your labor belong to you and you alone, in the form of bulging biceps and six-pack abs?
Do we need a major catastrophe, like the bubonic plague or the small pox epidemic, in order to solve economic inequality? That’s what one author, historian Walter Scheidel, thinks.
How long do you think one should spend with a piece of visual art to “get” it? And what does it really mean to “get” a piece of art? What is art doing for us? And what explains the feeling of understanding art?
We often think of a love as something natural and powerful—a mysterious feeling we experience spontaneously, deep in the recesses of our essential selves. But our love, and our capacity to love, may have a lot more to do with our society than we acknowledge.
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia, enjoys an open relationship…
On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Richard Spencer, a polemic thought leader in the…