Political Philosophy

Leiter opens a realist front: 'there is no such thing as real normativity'

The blogger who announced Alexy's death stands at the opposite pole from him in legal philosophy. Brian Leiter's new collection from Oxford argues that what explains a judge's decisions is not reasons but psychology, ideology and social circumstance. A review in NDPR points to a tension.

Whose labour is the machine absorbing? A call for labour process theory in HCI

A paper accepted for CHI 2026 argues that human-computer interaction has settled for studying artificial intelligence as a 'tool', and puts labour process theory, from Marx to Braverman, back on the table. The question is not a technical one: whose skill is the machine absorbing?

Searle's room has emptied, but the question is still standing

The philosopher of the Chinese Room died on 17 September 2025, aged ninety-three. To remember him as the man who said computers cannot think is to reduce him to a single thought experiment. Searle's real question was wider — it ran from money to the state, from speech to institutions. And his legacy is contested.

David Chalmers

Reading Marx today: alienation, commodity fetishism and who owns the machine

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.

Mouffe: democracy is not the art of agreement but of taming conflict

For forty years she has pressed one thesis: people cannot agree on fundamental values, and this is no defect. Democracy's job, for Mouffe, is not to bring everyone round to a single view but to turn the enemy into an adversary. Empty the political stage and the passions remain — someone else fills it.

Foucault at a hundred: an oeuvre that has kept growing since his death

Born in 1926, Foucault reaches his centenary in the same year that the first volume of The History of Sexuality turns fifty. The symposium meeting in Pennsylvania at the end of September is no mere commemoration: thirteen Collège de France lecture courses and a fourth volume, published after his death, have made rereading him unavoidable.

Augustine of Hippo: the philosopher who turned inwards

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.

Cicero: the orator who kept asking what a republic is

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?

Butler: 'We never in fact had a democracy'

On the opening panel of the PEN World Voices Festival, Judith Butler declined to speak about the loss of democracy: what we are mourning, she said, is a possibility that was never realised. The sentence condenses thirty years of philosophy in which identity, recognition and living together are three names for one problem.

Judith Butler