Academic philosophy has a novelty problem. Novelty has become a litmus test for a contribution’s value. This results in a common undertaking for academic researchers. Read a bunch. Look for holes and gaps. Figure out what hasn’t been said. Try to insert yourself in a conversation by saying something new. On first glance, this approach might appear to make sense. If it’s not new, why do we need it? Yet a fixation on novelty sculpts a landscape of philosophical inquiry that (...) is inhospitable and self-undermining. (shrink)

While it is largely agreed upon that solidarity is a kind of unity among persons, this agreement is short-lived – for if solidarity involves unity, what kind of unity is this? That is, does solidarity coalesce around shared identity or simply fellow-feeling? Shared action or fate? Or is solidarity merely a matter of commitment to a particular cause to achieve certain ends? Below, I look to examples of Mutual Aid to reject a piece-meal model of solidarity (where solidarity is this (...) but not that) in favor of a more pluralistic account. The notion of solidarity need not be constrained, all or nothing, by a specific strain of interpretation. Instead, we should recognize that solidarity is a matter of variety and degree. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, an excerpt: "The idea of the life worth living is as old as human thought. Pick your tradition or epoch; whether it is characterized as religious, philosophical, ethnic, or cultural, one finds a constant: humans are in the business of distinguishing the good from the merely extant, the what-should-be from the what-is. A staggeringly wide swath of intellectual and religious traditions across the ages agrees on this point: organisms like us are not content with how (...) we find ourselves in the world. We instead strive to refashion our surroundings, to make new worlds, and to dream of, even worship, what might be. Nonetheless, often we tightly tie the good, the desirable, and even the stakes of the divine to the state of our bodies: how our bodies are, how we work or fail to work upon them, and how they fit or misfit, to invoke Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s sense of the term. It is human to link worth with body and body with worth. To be sure, I do not mean 'body' in contradistinction to 'mind.' Put better, then: it is human, all too human, to link worth with bodymind." . (shrink)

If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s The Hobbit I don’t need to tell you that Mirkwood is a dangerous place. As bad as we might feel for Thorin and company as they try to navigate the forest and fall prey to its traps, we should feel worse for ourselves. Our world is also dangerous and difficult, but in a different way. Although it’s some comfort that the spiders of our world are smaller, it is easier to travel through Mirkwood than it (...) is to know what to believe. At least when it comes to navigating Mirkwood the directions are clear. (shrink)

Objectivity may be a useful regulative ideal for inquiry, but here I ponder to what extent it may be thought of more as a political ideology than an epistemological methodology. By tracing objectivity to its political origins, I aim to problematize this ideal as we tend to understand it - as one demanding that we eliminate the influence of certain subjective features - and to sketch a new conception of this ideal that accommodates (rather than dismisses) the role of these (...) features in inquiry. (shrink)

The present study tries to understand the worldview associated with Confucianism and examines the concept of “order” in relation to its three timeless truths – the concept of time, the relativistic worldview, and the clan.

The present study tries to understand the worldview associated with Confucianism and examines the concept of “order” in relation to its three timeless truths – the concept of time, the relativistic worldview, and the clan.

Strange weather is one of the growing ways human beings experience climate change phenomenologically or beyond abstract scientific data. Even those who do not “believe” in climate change experience it. Odd weather is also one of first things human beings talk about with one another or share, today and at least since the great flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This article considers how increasingly violent weather is ushering in a new type of narrative and art and announcing a new (...) political and climatic regime. It considers a series of contemporary works of art about strange weather as a more precise example or microcosm of a certain reinvention of epic in our time. It then considers how this shared narrative of violent weather is intruding on, disrupting, and reconfiguring our political systems at the same time as it is collectivizing, historicizing, and politicizing the public before the growing threat of climate change. (shrink)