Your Only Failure Is Your Utter Lack of Culture: Eight Life Lessons from Anton Chekhov’s Letter to His Brother

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture.

Hey Parents: Let Your Children Be Radical Novelties!

In “Becoming Parents to Ourselves” Eldar Sarajlic, an assistant professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, offers some words of wisdom on parenthood. Although he gets stuck in the weeds at some point and assumes that our personal identities are built on rational reflections (when they are also built on chance or …

The Radical Queen is Dead, Long Live the Traditional Elites: Zizek’s Takedown of Game of Thrones (Season 8)

The stakes in the final conflict are thus: should the revolt against tyranny be just a fight for the return of the old kinder version of the same hierarchical order, or should it develop into the search for a new order that is needed?

Oddballs of English Philosophy: Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan Rée

Despite the disarming glee of this intellectual romp, [Jonathan] Rée doesn’t quite banish the thought that, for the English, philosophy is what history was to Henry Ford, bunk — a notion clinched by T.S. Eliot’s portrait of Bertrand Russell as Mr Apollinax, wittering incomprehensibly and laughing like an irresponsible foetus at his own wit.

What’s Wrong with Being a Generalist?

I’ve always thought that life is too short, the world too big, and the wonders of existence too many, to specialize in anything. But today’s ruling ethos says that specialization is the key to advancing career-wise or to becoming a celebrated pianist. Is this really true?

The Philosophy of The Filthy, Excessive and Unclean

Philosophers don’t often discuss filth and all its disgusting variations, but investigating the unclean turns out to be as useful an exercise as examining the highest ideals of justice, morality and metaphysics.

(M)Existentialism: The Habitat of Emilio Uranga’s Thinking

Emilio Uranga (1921-1988) articulates what we could call Existentialism “a la Mexicana”, Mexican existentialism, or (M)existentialism...It does not escape Mexican philosophers that a thinking of totality, a thinking that transcends contingency and place, has been the hallmark of philosophy since it’s naming by the Greeks.

Review: Witcraft by Jonathan Rée and The History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling

Whereas Rée shows how religion and political radicalism can strike up fruitful alliances, the briskly rationalist Grayling refuses the title of philosophy to any view of the world that involves religious faith...The difference between them is clear from their writing. Rée is enter­taining and stylish, Grayling is lucid but lifeless.