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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
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The concepts, legacies and afterlives of thinkers.
The founding text of Western political philosophy argues that most people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. The ship of state, the guardians' curriculum, the quarrel with the sophists and the noble lie belong to one argument — and the modern replies to it, from Karl Popper to David Estlund, are less conclusive than they look.
Elizabeth Anderson, Plato
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Three centuries after his death in Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz survives in undergraduate memory as the man with the monads and the man Voltaire mocked. Both caricatures obscure the project that actually drove him: the conviction that reasoning could be made into a calculation, and the reasons he thought machines could never finish the job.
Timothy Williamson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
He is filed under world-systems theory, which flattens him. Wallerstein's real move was to reject the national economy as the unit of analysis, and with it a century of comparative social science. Six years after his death, the framework is being spoken by people who have never read him.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Expelled from her university in 1948, the Turkish classicist Azra Erhat did her most consequential work afterwards: a Homer that took root in a language, and a contested claim that the ancient cultures of Anatolia belong to the people living there now.
Everyone carries a potted Wittgenstein: first he drew the limits of language, then he decided meaning is use. Specialists have largely stopped believing that story. What survives is stranger and more useful - a single long experiment in what philosophy is for.
Anthony Kenny, Ludwig Wittgenstein
For two hundred years Hegel has been filed under 'unintelligible'. Yet the concept of his that is most discussed today is not obscure at all: we learn who we are only in the way others see us. In October the Hegel Society of America meets, this time on time.
The twentieth century turned Marx into the name of a political programme. The twenty-first is reading him again as an analyst: alienation, commodity fetishism, ecology, republican freedom. The question 'who owns artificial intelligence?' is that reading's examination paper.
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.
To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?
