Political Philosophy

Jacques Rancière and the argument he has made five times

Archive research, pedagogy, political theory, film and literature: across sixty years Jacques Rancière has restated one claim in five different materials. Equality is not a destination but a premise, and politics is the moment someone demonstrates it. The claim has costs, and his critics have named them precisely.

Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser

Kripke, Eucken and Lazarus: three ways a name gets hold of a thing

Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022, aged 81. Rudolf Eucken, the 1908 Nobel literature laureate, died on this day in 1926 and was forgotten within a generation. Moritz Lazarus, who defined a people as those who count each other as one, was born on this day in 1824.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke

Amodei wants the AI frontier paced but names no authority that could bind it

Dario Amodei's essay of 12 September argues that capability is now outrunning oversight, and proposes embedded evaluators, industry standards and a deal with China. The argument about rates is stronger than its critics allow. The mechanism is weaker, because nothing in it can compel anyone.

Nick Bostrom

David Harvey at 90, and the theory that capital produces space

For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.

Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey

Philosophers ask governments for an AI treaty modelled on nuclear arms control

An open letter written by Molly Gardner and published on 11 September asks elected officials for a treaty on the model of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to pause, slow or halt frontier AI development everywhere. Its signatories are mainstream ethicists. On Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg proposed something stranger, and David Wallace objected.

Cornel West, Robert George and the uses of fruitful disagreement

Twice this autumn Cornel West shares a stage with the conservative Catholic jurist Robert P. George. The double act is charming and much praised. It is also worth interrogating: what does it show about West's philosophy of truth, and what does it quietly assume about who gets to argue well?

Cornel West, Elizabeth Anderson, Alasdair MacIntyre

Plato against the vote: the Republic's case for rule by those who know

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

Slavoj Žižek: the persona, the philosophy and the gap between them

He is the most visible living philosopher in the world and among the most routinely dismissed, and the same habits explain both. Underneath the jokes there is a theory of belief, a reconstructed Lacan and a Hegel who never reaches reconciliation — and a record of political misjudgement that his defenders too often skip.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Alenka Zupančič, Peter Sloterdijk

11 September: Hanslick, Jeans, Adorno and the question of what an interpreter may claim

Eduard Hanslick was born on this date in 1825, James Jeans in 1877, Theodor Adorno in 1903. Each spent a career on the same awkward question: how far an interpreter may go beyond what the object actually says. In 2001 the date itself became a name, and two philosophers fell out over whether it named anything.

Jürgen Habermas