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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
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Statements, arguments and debates from living philosophers.
On the opening panel of the PEN World Voices Festival, Judith Butler declined to speak about the loss of democracy: what we are mourning, she said, is a possibility that was never realised. The sentence condenses thirty years of philosophy in which identity, recognition and living together are three names for one problem.
Judith Butler
J. G. A. Pocock changed the rules for the history of political thought. He asked not what philosophers thought but which language let them think it. His notion of 'political languages' shows that what a text can say is settled in advance — and it applies to today's arguments too.
The American Philosophical Association has chosen Kit Fine to deliver the 2027 Nicholas Rescher Prize Lecture. The decision points not to one man but to the fortunes of a field: metaphysics, declared meaningless for much of the twentieth century, is back at the centre of analytic philosophy.
The Chicago philosopher objects, in Open Socrates, to the familiar portrait: Socrates was not a sceptic but an intellectualist. In conversation with Merve Emre she explains why the distinction matters — and why philosophy cannot be done on one's own.
More than a hundred books, running from hedonism to atheism and from readings of Nietzsche to political polemic. Onfray has now begun a four-volume series that sets out to rewrite the history of Western thought. What makes him contentious is not only what he argues but where he chooses to argue it.
Love, loneliness, status anxiety and the search for meaning. The Anglo-Swiss writer is the best-known figure taking philosophy beyond the bounds of academic specialism and applying it to ordinary concerns. His question is as old as Socrates': how should we live?
The philosopher who carries the Frankfurt School's inheritance argues that behind social conflict lies an invisible demand: recognition. In his recent work he has taken that framework into working life, asking whether democracy can be learnt on the job.
Axel Honneth
The final volume of a trilogy thirty years in the making turns on a single question: is going on living a principle, or an opportunity that depends on circumstances? Earlier this year the French philosopher put the same question to the limits of medicine.
'Being and Nothingness' is a chapter from Quentin Meillassoux's 1997 doctoral thesis, which has never been published as a book. The text shows the first form of the principle of factiality, which twenty years later would sit at the heart of After Finitude — and it takes that form in an argument with Derrida.
Quentin Meillassoux
