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About Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg writes about the links between social structure and the implicit framing of experience. He has published essays on the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and several books, including The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of Capitalism; A New Biology of Religion; and Enlightenment Interrupted: The Lost Moment of German Idealism and the Reactionary Present.
Latest Posts | By Michael Steinberg
Thomas Nagel’s Bat and Ours
7 months ago

Thomas Nagel’s Bat and Ours

There is a bat in our bedroom. We don’t know how it got in, but bats can crawl through the narrowest of crevices and passageways, and our old house is …
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A Few Points of Philosophical Interest Learned by Watching Our Cats: Part II
1 year ago

A Few Points of Philosophical Interest Learned by Watching Our Cats: Part II

If cats are conscious but not self-conscious—that is, if they do not split experience in two and constitute an inner self which stands at one remove from all other perceptions—they …
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A Few Points of Philosophical Interest Learned by Watching Our Cats: Part I
1 year ago

A Few Points of Philosophical Interest Learned by Watching Our Cats: Part I

Above is our cat Oliver, in a photograph made by my wife Loret. Oliver is four years old. He takes to visitors, though he can be skittish, and they take …
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Fichte. Seriously.
2 years ago

Fichte. Seriously.

In the English-speaking world Johann Gottlieb Fichte (17623-1814) is treated as what one might call a footnote philosopher, mentioned—if at all—only in connection with someone or something else. He is …
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It Is Not Humanity That Is Failing: A Manifesto
2 years ago

It Is Not Humanity That Is Failing: A Manifesto

At some point we will have to admit that we have failed. We will not have averted catastrophic climate change. We will not have spread prosperity as far as it …
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