The coming-of-age story at the heart of the award-winning film Moonlight gets a lot of its power from the way it upends the prevailing inner-city narrative. This rejection of expectation helps illustrate the relationship between storytelling and identity formation described by Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Whose Country Is It? Whomever It Inhabits
King Laius died at the Cleft Way, where he got in the way of an emigrant to Thebes who happened also to be his son. The prophecy was that Oedipus would be the death of Laius, and it was in the name of avoiding this fate that father and son worked together to seal it. Continue Reading …
Playing God: The Rise of the Actor and the Decline of Tragic Art
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that, through his protégé Euripides, Socrates had injected into Greek tragedy the seed of questioning doubt that brought an end to the religious animus of drama, the fire that fueled its creation and sustained it. Thus, cold reason killed tragedy. Although he would later modify this view, it remains a powerful and influential polemic in the history of aesthetics.
Can Refugees Be Nietzscheans?
In 1996, Samuel Huntington presented a theory of “clashes” occurring between different civilizational blocks. Huntington traced the mindsets of different people to solid religious sources. However, what if the difference between civilizational blocks is that some have read Nietzsche and others haven’t?
Richard Rorty and the Origins of Post-Truth
Some have traced the origins of our “post-truth” era back to post-modernism and relativism. Could a look at Richard Rorty’s philosophy help us understand the “post-truth” phenomenon?
PEL 2017 Calendar w/ Art from Existential Comics
You like Existential Comics, right? Corey Mohler has drawn the philosopher pictures for our PEL wall calendar. Go buy it now. For an additional $2.50, we’ll throw in Mark’s Songs from the Partially Examined Life CD. Buy the calendar-CD combo.
Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love
The popular Netflix show is rife with philosophical questions. “Can Aristotle teach Bojack a thing or two about self-love?” is one of them.
What Is It Like to Be Ourselves? A Debate on Consciousness and the Mind
Although we spend most of our lives in a state of consciousness, as soon as we subject it to more careful scrutiny we realize that we know very little about it—how does it actually happen? And how does conscious experience fit into our scientific picture of the world?
On Childhood, Motherhood, and Being Ahead of Your Time: Shulamith Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
Almost fifty years ago there was an influential woman who called pregnancy “barbaric,” described childhood as “hell,” and said giving birth was “like shitting a pumpkin.” Shulamith Firestone was a radical activist and remarkably prescient thinker who helped define feminism as we know it. Yet today she remains largely—and unfairly—unknown.
Books of Wisdom
What good are philosophy books? Can they make us any the wiser? A look at a humorous essay by Robert Wilson Lynd that demonstrates the difficulty of acquiring wisdom from books alone.
Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović, and Freudian Ambivalence
“If you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed.” A 1974 performance art piece by Marina Abramović explores our deepest human instincts.
Cosmopolitanism, Rawls, Borders, and Trumpism
Nationalism has a bad reputation. Varieties of nationalist thought have been responsible for many of the horrors of the last century. Nonetheless, important philosophers and political theorists have made the cases that more reasoned forms of nationalism can provide credible theoretical justification for determining the boundaries between those within a political community and those outside of it.
Humor and Infinite Responsibility: Can Levinas Use a Little Stand-Up Comedy?
What is infinite responsibility? And can we live with it?
PEL Live Show/Election Special at Brown University on October 27: de Tocqueville and the Problem with Democracy
Grab your hats: PEL will be doing a live recording at Brown University on October 27, 2016.
How Moral Is the Moral Machine?
Researchers at MIT are pooling our moral intuitions, and we need to talk about it.
The Hubris of Transhumanism
Is transhumanism just dangerous over-confidence in technology?
Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature
When it comes to ethics and human choice, there is “a serious candidate for truth” that we haven’t considered properly.
Deinotes: Dread, Wonder, and the Art of Persuasion
How a single Greek word can explain why we don’t like the Sophists, why Socrates was accused of being one of them, and what makes rhetoric successful.
Were the Sophists Really All That Bad?
Were Sophists really the immoral truth-benders that Plato portrayed them to be? Classical scholars don’t seem to think so.
What Do Existentialists Think about Love?
Given the existentialist emphasis on concrete personal experience, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, awareness of death, and personal determination of values, it is not surprising that existentialist philosophers should also consider the question of romantic love.