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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
The thirty-first annual meeting of the North American Sartre Society will be held online on 23-24 October 2026. Its theme carries existentialism's most familiar concepts — bad faith, the look, freedom and situation — into the digital, this time among avatars and algorithms.
World Desk · 7 September 2026
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Michael Devitt's collection from Oxford University Press takes stock of one of the longest-running arguments in the philosophy of language: what does a name refer to? The review in NDPR calls it the most consistent defence yet written from within the causal tradition.
For forty years she has pressed one thesis: people cannot agree on fundamental values, and this is no defect. Democracy's job, for Mouffe, is not to bring everyone round to a single view but to turn the enemy into an adversary. Empty the political stage and the passions remain — someone else fills it.
Moses Mendelssohn was born on 6 September 1729; Donna Haraway on 6 September 1944. One argued that a state has no business inspecting its citizens' beliefs; the other dismantled the figure of the pure human subject with a cyborg. Two hundred and fifteen years apart, both were asking who gets admitted to the community of reason.
A professor of psychiatry, a psychiatrist and the artificial intelligence researcher Murray Shanahan have written a paper together. Their thesis: long, emotionally charged conversations with AI can loosen the settled criteria people use to judge mind, reality and authority. And the systems offer an interpretive frame at exactly that moment.
Born in 1926, Foucault reaches his centenary in the same year that the first volume of The History of Sexuality turns fifty. The symposium meeting in Pennsylvania at the end of September is no mere commemoration: thirteen Collège de France lecture courses and a fourth volume, published after his death, have made rereading him unavoidable.
He thought about time not through clocks but through memory, expectation and attention. He showed that the will can be divided against itself. And he turned the road to truth inward. To count Augustine a theologian and nothing more is to conceal his extraordinary modernity.
The Berggruen Institute's essay competition takes its inspiration from the Dijon Academy contest that Rousseau won in 1750. It does not want a peer-reviewed paper; it wants an essay in the tradition of Montaigne and Emerson. One of the 2025 winners was Anil Seth, a name this column has been citing all week.
