Individualist and communitarian. Anarchist and totalitarian. Classicist and romanticist. Progressive and reactionary. Since the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been said to be all of these things. Few philosophers have been the subject...

"Man is a political animal", Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the "Politics". In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle's claim and explores th...

In "Freedom and the End of Reason", Richard L. Velkley offers an influential interpretation of the central issue of Kant's philosophy and an evaluation of its position within modern philosophy's larger history. He persuasively argues that the whole o...

What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice's rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin th...

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God's authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the ear...

Always connect – that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself – those messages t...

The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In "Deconstructing Dignity", Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philos...

The absolute was one of the most significant philosophical concepts in the early nineteenth century, particularly for the German romantics. Its exact meaning and its role within philosophical romanticism remain, however, a highly contested topic amon...

History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no...

In this newest installment in Chicago's series of Jacques Derrida's seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the...