Philosophy

How Art Breaks the Curse of the Familiar 5
- Philosophy
- August 14, 2023
“Familiarity breeds contempt” runs the old adage, and contempt leads to ingratitude and unhappiness. What makes a husband impatient with his wife, whom he would never have dreamed of snapping at when they were first dating? Familiarity. What makes one’s work dull and draining? Familiarity. What makes us bored of our home, our family, our
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Who Is Michel Foucault? The Intellectual Root of CRT and Radical Gender Ideology 9
- Philosophy
- July 27, 2023
French philosopher and social critic Paul-Michel Foucault has long stood as an intellectual juggernaut in humanities programs all around the world. For better or worse, the contemporary understanding of critical theory—and critical race theory—as well as gender theory owes debts to Foucault’s ideas about power, knowledge, and language. Even beyond the classroom, Foucault’s ideas have
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What’s a Luddite? An Expert on Technology and Society Explains 0
- Culture, Philosophy
- July 10, 2023
The term “Luddite” emerged in early 1800s England. At the time there was a thriving textile industry that depended on manual knitting frames and a skilled workforce to create cloth and garments out of cotton and wool. But as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, steam-powered mills threatened the livelihood of thousands of artisanal textile workers.
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Myth and Materialism 3
- Literature, Philosophy
- July 7, 2023
I’ll never forget reading my first chemistry textbook. The thesis of the introduction was that everything can be explained by chemistry. Everything. From the weather to plants to human thought and human behavior. I remember feeling particular disgust when the textbook claimed that what we call love is actually just the interaction and activation of
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Evil Is Rising, but Despair Is Not an Option 1
- Politics, Philosophy
- May 24, 2023
To many people, the world seems to make less and less sense with each passing day. Values we once cherished and that bound civil society together face daily bombardment. Offensive things are routinely said and done today in ways intended to inflame and divide. Freedoms we took for granted—freedoms of thought, speech, press, religion—are under
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Against Determinism 7
- Philosophy
- May 10, 2023
In Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir published a long discussion she had with her companion—the world-renowned, radical-left philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre—in the last years of his life. Though the two of them believed many things I find unpalatable, this phrase served me for some time as an email signature: Simone de Beauvoir: Broadly speaking,
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