Debates

“I know what you’re thinking, but it is NOT my mother!” This unprompted reflection by a patient led Freud to the perplexing insight not only that ‘mother’ occupied some unusually …
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 Professors, like other teachers, must accustom themselves to being misinterpreted. For example, in a philosophy of law class I once cited the famous adage, variously and often mistakenly attributed, that …
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Everyone’s busy debating whether Donald Trump’s global tariff plan is economic protectionism, geopolitical strategy, electoral propaganda, or the act of a madman who has lost the plot. It seems to …
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The recent debate over “AI Slop”—a term coined to dismiss AI-generated works as trash—brings to light a host of issues. Some, like Ted Gioia, lament a vaguely defined “good taste” …
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“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty windowpane, the past is something he could see but not touch … If he could break through that dusty …
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My favored plot of crime novels concerns a person (usually a woman) who is in mortal danger. Unknown forces try to kill her because she knows something she shouldn’t have …
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That every like is not the same, O Ceasar! The heart of Brutus yearns to think upon! William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Today we live in societies where real interpersonal relations have …
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The relationship between Michel Foucault and Philip Rieff is best understood through contrast rather than any direct interaction or influence. On the surface, they could hardly be more different. Foucault, …
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Slavoj Žižek’s recent provocation in The Philosophical Salon, “Why a Communist Must Assume that Life is Hell,” introduces a subtle but profoundly unsettling reimagining of the political and existential stakes …
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This essay begins, in its first part, by questioning the assumption that human agency is individual and identical with the activity of a pre-social core of conscious experience. Its second …
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