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Richard Rorty asked philosophy to stop pretending it could underwrite science, morals and politics, and to settle instead for making cruelty harder to ignore. Thirty years on, with the strongman passage from Achieving Our Country quoted in every election, the question is whether his liberal ironist can still hold the line.
Richard Rorty
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Arthur O. Lovejoy
Alasdair MacIntyre died in May 2025 insisting that modern moral argument is interminable because the words outlived the world that made sense of them. His diagnosis in After Virtue, the disquieting suggestion, emotivism, Nietzsche or Aristotle, the wait for another Benedict, reads differently in a year of shouting. Here is what holds and what does not.
Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
Jacques Derrida, Nicolai Hartmann
Matteo Ricci was born in Macerata on 6 October 1552. The Jesuit who entered China dressed as a Buddhist monk and died in Beijing as a Confucian scholar translated Euclid into Chinese, argued for the Christian God in the vocabulary of the classics, and began a dispute about rites that Rome settled only in 1939. Le Corbusier shares the birthday.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Confucius, Matteo Ricci
Ioanna Kuçuradi, the Turkish philosopher who in 1998 became the first woman to preside over the world federation of philosophical societies and who argued that human rights follow from what a human being is rather than from any treaty, has died in Istanbul at 89, two days before her ninetieth birthday.
Ioanna Kuçuradi
The Chinese-American philosopher Tu Weiming has spent sixty years pressing a single claim: that to become modern a society need not become Western. This profile sets out his idea of 'cultural China', the Boston Confucians, and his attempt to revive Confucian humanism as a living philosophy, and asks whether it holds.
Tu Weiming
Almost unread in English, the Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has spent forty years on a sentence that looks like a grammatical slip: why am I me? We explain his singular 'I', how it differs from solipsism, and why Anglophone philosophy of mind mostly declined to ask the question.
Thomas Nagel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hitoshi Nagai
Falling fertility and ageing in rich societies, and migration across every border, force an old question back open: who makes up a political community, and who gets to decide? A reading through Arendt, Carens, Walzer, Miller, Pogge and Parfit.
Will Kymlicka, Thomas Pogge, Philippe Van Parijs, Hannah Arendt
