Don’t Take Life So Seriously: Montaigne’s Life Lessons

My dad was an unhappy man. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. By the time his health really started failing, his arthritis so bad he could no longer get out of bed, his condition became all he …

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.

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.

Philosophy In The News, Weekly: March 31 – April 7, 2019

The best of the philosophical internet featuring a preview of the upcoming intellectual showdown between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek; China's vagrant philosopher who went viral; Podcaster Joe Rogan as today's Socrates; and a teenager's off-the-grid life in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Philosophy In The News, Weekly: March 18 – April 1, 2019

The best of the philosophical internet featuring Stoicism for Silicon Valley techies; 'The Matrix' 20 years on; civic republicanism's planet-saving potential; and Kierkegaard’s restless and ridiculed life.