Concepts

Gilles Deleuze and the vocabulary that outran its arguments

Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.

Byung-Chul Han, Nick Land, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze

Eight books, one question: the philosophy that defined 2026 so far

Six of the year's most consequential philosophy books are about artificial intelligence. The two that are not — a history of the concept and a history of prediction — are the reason the other six are worth reading. A survey of the year to September.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Yuk Hui, Carissa Véliz

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the case against the two-sentence summary

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

How divided can a society be and still be a democracy?

Democracy rests on habits no constitution records: the loser conceding, the winner not calling the opponent illegitimate, courts treated as everyone's courts. New comparative evidence from nine democracies suggests the link between political hatred and the collapse of those habits is real but far less mechanical than the alarm suggests.

Robert Alexy dies: the man who gave law back its claim to correctness

Robert Alexy, among the most influential legal philosophers of the past half-century, died on Saturday 5 September at the age of 80, four days short of his 81st birthday. He leaves a method behind him — proportionality. What he really leaves is a question. Is everything a state does law?

When a theory emigrates: what became of Alexy in Brazil

Brazil's Supreme Federal Court issued a note of condolence on Alexy's death — an unusual gesture towards a German academic. The interesting part of the story lies elsewhere: Brazilian lawyers have spent years debating something they call 'balancing, Brazilian style', and they do not mean it as praise.

Chomsky cannot speak, but the argument goes on: a Monist special issue in October

Noam Chomsky has been treated in Brazil since the severe brain haemorrhage he suffered in 2024, and has withdrawn from public life. He has not withdrawn from the argument. In October The Monist, one of philosophy's oldest journals, gives a whole issue to his legacy — with large language models at the centre of it.

Noam Chomsky

Hegel's most modern concept is not the dialectic but recognition

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.

'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

Ethan Landes argues that experimental philosophers should stop justifying their surveys by their relevance to analytic debates and declare themselves an independent tradition. The comment thread that followed shows the discipline is not close to agreeing what makes something philosophy.