Amor Mundi

A Eulogy for Jacques Taminiaux

By Kazue Koishikawa
Jacques Taminiaux, professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Louvain and Boston College, passed away on May 7^th, 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.

A Disjunctive or  Disruptive President?

By Roger Berkowitz
Jack 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...

Not All Populisms Are the Same

By Samantha Hill
Writing 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.

Friends of Academia

By Roger Berkowitz
Randall 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.

Diversity Index

By Samantha Hill
Thomas 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...

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.

Hannah Arendt’s Ethics

By Samantha Hill
Two 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...

What Illiberal Democracy Means

By Roger Berkowitz
In 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.

Student Protests

By Samantha Hill
Students 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.”