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A Politics of Meaning
By Roger BerkowitzIn an essay on Arendt in this year’s Critique 13/13 Seminars, Seyla Benhabib asks whether it makes sense to read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as a core text in the somewhat arcane world of critical theory. For Benahabib, Arendt’s text is “critical” insofar as it “shares with the Marxist tradition a critique of the alienation of the homo faber from the products...
02-14-2020
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A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux
By Kazue KoishikawaJacques Taminiaux, professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Louvain and Boston College, passed away on May 7th, 2019 at the age of 90 years. As those familiar with continental philosophy know, he left a tremendous legacy in the field of phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt, and more.
05-22-2019
A Disjunctive or Disruptive President?
By Roger BerkowitzJack Balkin of Yale Law School recently described Donald Trump as a disjunctive president. Using a model developed by Stephen Skowroneck, Balkin argues that Trump represents the “last gasp of the vanishing Reagan era that began in 1980.” He writes...
05-19-2019
Not All Populisms Are the Same
By Samantha HillWriting for the Boston Review, Jason Frank argues that we should reassess the popular use of the term populism to describe a wide range of emergent illiberal political regimes from Orban’s Hungary to Trump’s United States.
05-19-2019
Friends of Academia
By Roger BerkowitzRandall Kennedy writes that all “friends of academia” must sound the alarm in response to Harvard University’s decision to remove Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as Faculty Dean’s of the undergraduate college’s Winthrop House.
05-19-2019
Diversity Index
By Samantha HillThomas Chatterton Williams responds to the SATs new adversity index which will factor in social conditions like neighborhood and crime rates. Chatterton Williams argues that this index is a Band-Aid solution that will not address the structural inequalities that students face. He writes...
05-19-2019
Why Arendt Matters:
David Brin
Why Arendt Matters is a series of short video interviews with prominent writers and thinkers. This week, we replay an episode with David Brin, science fiction writer and futurist. 05-16-2019
Hannah Arendt’s Ethics
By Samantha HillTwo pieces on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil appeared this week. In a review essay for Contemporary Political Theory John Macready offers a probing critique of Deirdre Lauren Mahony’s Hannah Arendt’s Ethics...
05-12-2019
What Illiberal Democracy Means
By Roger BerkowitzIn the United States, terms like “academic freedom” and “free speech” have come to be scoffed at by many students and faculty. They have somehow been turned into conservative talking points.
05-12-2019
Student Protests
By Samantha HillStudents at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts are trying to get Camille Paglia fired “and replaced by a queer person of color.” The campaign was provoked by a talk Paglia proposed on “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.”
05-12-2019