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The fifth conference of the Italian network for the philosophy of mathematics runs from 9 to 11 September at the University of Bologna. Three headings: applicability, ontology and reasoning. One keynote goes straight at the field's oldest problem: do mathematical objects have a nature?
He wrote about madness, illness, crime and sexuality, but he asked a single question: how does a human being make himself a subject, and how does power operate while he does it? Foucault's real legacy is not his books but a habit of suspicion — one an age of digital surveillance needs more than ever.
Iulia Nistor's new book treats horror films not as a genre to be catalogued but as a means of philosophical thought. Her question is why anyone should choose to watch the thing that frightens him. The answer runs from Aristotle's catharsis to Kant's sublime and Kristeva's abject.
Michel Serres was born on 1 September 1930; Stanley Cavell on 1 September 1926. One brought philosophy together with science and myth, the other with cinema and ordinary language. Two thinkers born on the same day did the same work by different routes: opening philosophy's border with something from outside it.
The Scottish department marked for closure this summer has forced a retreat after a campaign. But the victory is conditional: the programme survives only in reduced form. This is the first time the wave of closures has been turned back, and it shows which argument can defend a philosophy department.
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.
The Hume scholar who put trust at the centre of moral philosophy made a proposal about academic assessment thirty years ago: judge a candidate not on everything they have published but on four papers of their own choosing. Now that machines write for nothing, it is back.
The philosopher who has pressed the most persistent objection to the moralising of political philosophy returns to the problem of orientation in a new collection from Polity. The title alludes to Heidegger's image of the forest path: most of them lead nowhere, but they become paths by being walked.
Cast out of his congregation at twenty-three under the heaviest curse its elders could pronounce, he ground lenses for a living and left his masterwork unpublished. But Spinoza's real radicalism was never his atheism: he did not deny God, he stripped God of personhood.
