Robert Musil and Life as Experiment
September 21, 2025
Robert Musil (1880-1942) was an Austrian novelist, famous for The Man Without Qualities. Set in…
Literature Tagged Episodes
Montaigne and the Art of the Essay
February 26, 2023
French thinker Michel de Montaigne invented a whole new genre in which to do philosophy:…
Summer Reading List: Banned Books Edition
September 4, 2022
The American Library Association reports that last year 1,597 books were challenged or removed from…
Walter Benjamin and the Re-Enchanted World
July 17, 2022
Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish critical theorist, essayist, and philosopher who died tragically during…
Reading the Troubled Past
March 13, 2022
Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe lambasted Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as a deeply racist work that…
Is Postmodernism Really to Blame for Post-Truth?
February 27, 2022
Postmodernism is often characterized by its rejection of concepts championed by the Enlightenment, like meaning,…
Comforting Conversations, pt.2
January 10, 2021
In troubling, uncertain times, the arts and humanities are more important than ever. Engaging with…
Comforting Conversations, pt.1
January 3, 2021
In troubling, uncertain times, the arts and humanities are more important than ever. Engaging with…
Poetry as a Way of Knowing
April 19, 2020
What is poetry? Mere word play? A pretty, or at any rate striking, way of…
Summer Reading List 2018
August 19, 2018
Summer is here – what philosophers, philosophies, or philosophical issues do you want to read…
Summer Reading List 2017
July 2, 2017
Summer is the perfect time to dig in to deep reading. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins…
Remixing Reality – Art and Literature for the 21st Century
April 16, 2017
For decades, literary critics have been questioning the relevance of the novel as a literary…
How Fiction Shapes Us
May 24, 2015
A good novel can do many things. It can distract us from the humdrum of…
Summer Reading List 2014
June 8, 2014
What philosophers, philosophies, or philosophical issues would you like to read up on over the…
The State of Public Philosophy
September 8, 2013
In the 18th and 19th Century, philosophers and intellectuals were immersed in politics and popular…
Reading, Narrative, and the Self
April 7, 2013
Reading is a lot of fun, especially narrative fiction – everyone loves a good story.…
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