Philosophy Archives

Philosophy

Time Is a Violent Stream

by Tom Bissell,

On losing a father and finding Stoicism

Truth Takes a Vacation

by Mark Edmundson,

Trumpism and the American philosophical tradition

Prime Factors

by Alec Wilkinson,

From A Divine Language, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1. Prime numbers are those that can be divided cleanly only by themselves and by…

Skiing and Nothingness

by Rachel Kushner,

My first skis, at age two, were Olin brand, a fluorescent coral pink. They had no edges. Their sidewalls were pure white, like cut cake. They glowed, a special and…

Flesh and Blood

by David Graeber, David Wengrow,

From The Dawn of Everything, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In the mid-twentieth century, a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchs…

The Mourning After

by Maggie Nelson,

From On Freedom, which was published last month by Graywolf Press. Time and time again, users testify in drug literature to a sense that substances are imbued with things we…

The Cancer Chair

by Christian Wiman,

Is suffering meaningless?

The Infinity of the Small

by Alan Lightman,

Have we reached the frontier of the minuscule?

Loaded Questions

From scenarios presented in Fighter Not Killer, an app that is used by militant groups, including the Islamic State, to test combatants’ knowledge of international humanitarian law. The app was…

Everything That Rises

by John Crowley,

I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings — a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any…

The Genealogy of Orals

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,

By Friedrich Nietzsche, from Anti-Education, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. The volume gathers five lectures on “the future of our educational institutions” that the…