Debates

The Albanian prime minister Edi Rama told the following joke at an international conference: “Russia is considering unifying its time zones because there is a nine-hour difference between one side …
Read More

I moved to Canada during the Vietnam war and almost by accident found myself an undergrad at Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I’m anything but Catholic, but …
Read More

More than two thousand years ago there was a king obsessed with demonstrating his greatness before other men as tyrants do best, through war and the use of violence. He …
Read More

It’s been decades now since the (neo/post) left academia tossed out a wide range of revolutionary strategies for abolishing capitalism and establishing socialism, a development in praxis that has likely …
Read More

There is no one right way to move through life. Being the kinds of creatures we are, we encounter difficulty, grief, and excitement. Through all of it, we can shape …
Read More

To a Western European with a vague knowledge of Italian, “Manipur” automatically associates with “mani pulite” (pure hands), the big anti-corruption campaign in the early 1990s that changed the whole …
Read More

The German socialist August Bebel once commented that antisemitism is the “socialism of fools” because the antisemites recognized capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish but who …
Read More

Events and Emergencies

In a recent text, Alain Badiou defines philosophy as “a meditation regarding the existence of truths that result from the event in a given situation of being.”[i] …
Read More

On the first day of my Introduction to Philosophy course, I ask students whether an artificial intelligence can fall in love. Many students believe this to be possible. A sophisticated …
Read More

In the prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt expresses her concerns about the launch of the first man-made satellite—Sputnik—into space. Our excitement about this event “second in importance to …
Read More