Kairos and Daimon as Complementary Concepts
The Ancient Greek concept of "kairos" comes to me vaguely in translation as "the opportune moment." Occasionally I encounter a fuller and more useful elaboration, as when…
Toward a Critique of Non-Aesthetic Judgement
The following reflection on Joshua Foa Dienstag’s 2016 article in Perspectives on Politics—“On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences”—comes from out of a relatively longstanding…
Freedom for Authenticity
“Freedom demands that individuals resist domination as much as it calls them to oppose being the perpetrators of domination.” – Melvin Rogers I could be overplaying…
Is the Grade System “Off the Mark”?
The infamous anecdote regarding French television executive Patrick Le Lay comes to me via the philosopher Bernard Stiegler. According to Stiegler, Le Lay had stated publicly that…
What is Populism?
“Christopher Lasch once famously declared that the professions ‘came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.’ [Emanuel] Haldeman-Julius’s idea was to do the opposite—to undermine elites…
What I Learned Wrestling With Kant
My basic takeaway from reading some of Immanuel Kant’s political essays a few years ago, including the one posing the question of enlightenment, is that the latter…
The Crisis of Modern Philosophy: Authenticity, Powerlessness, and the Struggle for Humanization
To say there is a crisis in philosophy could be the understatement of the past few centuries. Ever since Kant, and especially since Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the…