Debates

The publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks is followed inevitably by an expanding industry of scholarly publications on Heidegger’s “anti-Semitism”. Exposed to the unabashed and loaded terms that he attributed …
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We live in a postapocalyptic world.

Mind you, this is not a grim statement about the total devastation of our planet. I am not referring to the global environmental calamity …
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In the West, at least, we are becoming massively aware of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations. However, we should also bear in mind the (no less …
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What can we learn from Hegel on Donald Trump and his liberal critics? Quite a lot, surprisingly. In his critical account of Romantic irony, Hegel scathingly dismisses it as an …
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Political currents around the world have witnessed the rise of white nationalists who fear they are being replaced and express a desire to leave a world in which their children …
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Aesthetics is an expansive and foundational category of modern life, organizing our thoughts, institutions, and practices. As a professor of film and media studies, I typically engage aesthetics through the …
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Pope Francis usually displays the right intuitions in matters theological and political. Recently, however, he committed a serious blunder in endorsing the idea, propagated by some Catholics, of changing a …
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Irrationalism, The Political Right and Collective Identities

Many on the Left maintain that, in contrast to conservatives, we must have greater respect for difference. Conservatives are seen as supporting a …
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Flowers exist. Flowers are symptoms of sexual selection. Sexual selection is incredibly expensive from the genome’s point of view. So if genes are “selfish” in some sense, sexual selection is …
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An important moment in the highly emotional debate over President Trump’s controversial comments about white supremacist terrorism went unnoticed in the mainstream media: On CNN’s Don Lemon’s show, African-American Professor …
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