Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Deleuze and Guattari got the female orgasm wrong

13. February 2020 Philosophy News News
The urge to philosophise and strive to understand the deeper truths of ourselves, the world and the universe is as powerful as the urge to have sex. Yet my sexual enjoyment of philosophy was stymied when I realised how irrelevant female sexuality was to two of the greatest philosophers on sex: Deleuze and Guattari.When I first read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I wept at its beauty and laughed at its madness. I revelled in the revelations and became aroused at the possibilities it gave me. I learnt that my body had become two: one body that was organised, oppressed and repressed, as well as another body, without organs. This body is capable of being more than one sex, and to have more than one desire: “an open zone of possibility: desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.” This was a ‘microscopic transsexuality’ that I could access, through the power of my own desire. According to the philosophy I was reading, I could take on another [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle

The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche

13. February 2020 Philosophy News News
2020.02.10 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Tom Stern (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 447pp., $34.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781316613863. Reviewed by Jonathan Mitchell, University of Manchester This companion, edited by Tom Stern, comprises 16 chapters (and an Introduction) covering a range of topics in Nietzsche's philosophy. Given that it is billed as a companion, one would expect a balanced approach to debates in Nietzsche studies, alongside informative overviews. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from two central faults which undercut its ability to achieve this. On the one hand, a number of the chapters lack philosophical substance, reading more like discursive intellectual histories. On the other hand, the more philosophically inclined essays include misrepresentative snipes at 'analytic interpreters' of Nietzsche (mostly those notably absent from the volume). Nonetheless, there are worthwhile contributions; in what follows, I highlight these and draw attention to examples of where the volume was not up to... Read [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle

Lippitt from Hertfordshire to Notre Dame Australia

12. February 2020 Philosophy News News
John Lippitt, currently Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire, is moving to the University of Notre Dame Australia, where he will be Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University’s Institute for Ethics and Society. Professor Lippit’s main areas of research include Kierkegaard and ethics, especially the moral psychology of virtues and vices. His new book, Love’s Forgiveness, is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press later this year. You can learn more about his work here. Professor Lippitt takes up his new position on February 17th, and will retain a fractional appointment at Hertfordshire. The post Lippitt from Hertfordshire to Notre Dame Australia appeared first on Daily [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle

Philosophy Student Superheros

12. February 2020 Philosophy News News
by Allison Mitchell Origins I am fortunate to teach in a district which supports choice in all aspects of its English/Language Arts curriculum. Our students must take English 9 and English 10 but then are given a wide array of Upper-level English Electives to choose from. We offer over sixteen different electives ranging from Modern [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle

How (and why) to choose your philosophy of life

11. February 2020 Philosophy News News
How To Live A Good Life: A Guide To Choosing Your Personal Philosophy, edited by Pigliucci, Cleary and Kaufman, is a new volume collecting together 15 philosophers’ stories of how and why they chose their life philosophies. Here, the editors explain why selecting a life philosophy is an important decision, and how they picked their own. Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Clearly, that’s an exaggeration. Nevertheless, some philosophers have argued that if we don’t pay attention to why we live in a certain way rather than any other, we risk “misliving” our only life, getting to the end of it, on our proverbial death bed, and thinking: “shoot, I wasted it!” Or, as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych puts it: “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done… But how could that be, when I did everything properly?”In order to save you from Ilych’s fate, the three of us have asked 15 philosophers to write about their own life philosophy (or religion). Not just in terms of [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle

Underappreciated Philosophical Writing of the Past 50 Years, Part 1: 1970s

11. February 2020 Philosophy News News
Not everything notable gets noticed, and that’s true in philosophy, too. A valuable philosophical work may get overlooked because it was published in a lesser-known venue.  Or perhaps it was published in a part of the world or in a language that those in the mainstream tend to ignore. Perhaps sociological aspects of the profession concerning dominant writing style preferences or attitudes about the prestige of the author’s institutional affiliations led to its dismissal. Maybe it was ahead of its time, speaking to issues or presenting ideas or arguments the significance of which was only recognized much later. Maybe it was appreciated in its time, but somehow got lost in the crowd of publications since. Over the next few weeks, I hope gather lists of underappreciated philosophical writing of the past fifty years. These are articles, books, and book chapters that today’s philosophers are not adequately recognizing as valuable. It’s not an exact science, of course, judging both the significance of the work and the extent to which it is currently appreciated. I encourage people to err in ways that are more inclusive, as it’s better to hear about something you’ve already heard about than to miss out on hearing about something new (to you) and good. To keep things manageable we’ll break this project into decade-long chunks. This week, let’s look at the 1970s. Readers, please share your suggestions of underappreciated works from [More]
RSS | Podcasts | Twitter | Facebook | Kindle