The Politics of Friendship
I have a woman friend who’s been in my life over long stretches of time, interrupted by sharp breaks in the friendship – one break from me…
Philosophy and Philosophy
In recent months, I’ve been reading books that — if I weave them together — bestow overviews of two major branches of philosophy: Analytic Philosophy and Continental…
Levinas, the Other, and Me
Some years ago, I went to a conference on Emmanuel Levinas at Loyola University in Chicago.* I had just discovered Levinas, found him a dramatically original and…
The Fallacy of Misplaced Vagueness
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead spotlighted a previously unrecognized mistake in reasoning: “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It happens when we confuse an abstract concept for something…
Are We Seeing a Culture Shift?
Dates vary, when people try to characterize a phase of culture, but for (let us say) the past 50 years, opinion-shapers in our culture have functioned under…
Paris Without End
When I was a young girl, I wanted to be a great lover or a famous saint. Fortunately, once I was a bit older, my aims became…
Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt
In 1925, Hannah Arendt was a nineteen-year-old philosophy student at the University of Marburg. She kept a journal, one fragment of which is titled “Shadows.” It traces…