Articles

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in Western society around 1500, whereas by 2000 unbelief had become not merely possible but, for many, the most natural stance — sometimes the only conceivable one? This is the question that drives A Secular Age (2007), the most ambitious work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931). The book — nearly nine hundred pages that grew out of his 1998–99 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and earned him the 2007 Templeton Prize — refuses the easy explanations of secularization and offers, in their place, a historical and philosophical reconstruction of how the very conditions of belief in the West shifted over five centuries. ...

The very phrase “African philosophy” is itself a matter of philosophical debate. Before any doctrine, it raises a question about the criteria by which we recognize something as philosophy — criteria largely defined by the Western tradition. This article traces the main currents of African philosophical thought, from ancient Egypt to contemporary debates, without either erasing or essentializing a diversity that spans an entire continent and its diaspora. Three Preliminary Questions Any study of the field runs into three methodological problems: ...

Why do so many people, in an age of unprecedented freedom, fall ill from exhaustion, depression, and anxiety? The most influential answer in recent philosophy comes from Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959), a South Korean philosopher based in Germany, author of a series of short, aphoristic books that have become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. His central thesis is disconcerting: we fall ill not from an excess of repression but from an excess of positivity — from the compulsion to be able, to produce, and to perform that we turn against ourselves. This article reconstructs that diagnosis. ...

To speak of “Eastern philosophy” in the singular is, strictly, a Western simplification: the label gathers ancient and mutually independent traditions from China, India, and Japan, separated by languages, problems, and deeply different presuppositions. What unites them is not a shared doctrine but the fact that — in parallel with the Greek origins of philosophy, during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (c. 8th–3rd century BCE) — they developed rigorous, systematic answers to the great questions about reality, knowledge, the self, and right conduct. ...

With Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 CE), Neoplatonism gave ancient philosophy its last great synthesis: the ineffable One, from which all things emanate and to which all things return. But the story did not end there. In the following generations, disciples and successors transformed that vision into an ever vaster and more articulated system — and, at the same time, one ever more bound to religion and ritual. This late Neoplatonism, from Porphyry to Proclus, was the form in which Platonism reached the Latin, Arabic, and Byzantine Middle Ages. This article traces its three great names. (For the starting point, see the article on Plotinus and the emanation of the One.) ...

Latin American philosophy has a peculiarity that sets it apart from other traditions: it interrogates its own possibility before consolidating a body of doctrine. The question “is there a philosophy genuinely our own?” is no sign of weakness but a constitutive trait — the result of a history in which thought was imported, adapted, and gradually confronted with the concrete experience of the continent’s peoples. This article traces that trajectory: from the foundational debate over authenticity to the Philosophy of Liberation, Freire’s pedagogy, and decolonial thought. ...

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, while the Latin West knew only fragments of Aristotle, the Islamic world was the great guardian and continuator of Greek philosophy. Falsafa — the Arabic transliteration of the Greek philosophía — names the tradition that received, commented upon, and transformed the legacy of Aristotle and of Neoplatonism, facing the decisive problem of articulating Greek philosophical reason with Qur’anic revelation. Without it there would have been no rediscovery of Aristotle in the West and, to a large extent, no Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. This article traces its protagonists — Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, and Averroes — and the debate that runs through them. ...

Postcolonial theory is the body of currents that, from the 1970s–80s onward, critically analyzed the cultural, psychic, and epistemic effects of colonialism — not only during colonial rule but in its persistence after formal independence. Its object is not primarily the political economy of empire (studied by other traditions) but discourse: the representations, knowledges, and structures of subjectivity that made colonialism thinkable, sayable, and durable. This article traces its precursors — Du Bois and Fanon — and the trio that consolidated the field: Said, Spivak, and Bhabha. ...

Russian philosophy is one of Europe’s great national traditions — and one of its most singular. It was born late, in the nineteenth century, and not in the academic, systematic mold that shaped Germany from Kant to Hegel, but interwoven with literature, theology, and political urgency. Its central problems are not primarily epistemological but existential and ethical: the meaning of history, Russia’s destiny between East and West, human freedom in the face of evil, the possibility of a just community. It is no accident that its most influential philosophical texts include novels — those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — and essays written by exiles, prisoners, and priests. ...

When we want to know whether a society is just or whether a life is going well, what should we measure? Income? Wealth? Reported happiness? The capability approach, developed by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (b. 1933) and the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947), answers differently: what matters is what people are actually able to be and to do — the real freedoms they have to live the life they have reason to value. It is one of the most influential contributions to political philosophy and normative economics in recent decades, at the frontier between the two disciplines. ...

What is a good life? Not a pleasant life, nor a life successful in the eyes of others, but a life truly fulfilled, worthy of what we are. Aristotle’s answer to that question, set out in the Nicomachean Ethics, is among the most influential in history — and, after centuries of relative eclipse before the moralities of duty and of consequence-calculation, it has returned to the center of contemporary philosophical debate under the name “virtue ethics.” This article traces the core of that ethics: eudaimonia as the final end, virtue as habit and as a mean, practical wisdom, and friendship. For Aristotle’s metaphysics, see the article on substance; for his theory of justice, the article on justice. ...

Michel Foucault is perhaps the most cited thinker in the human sciences of the past half-century — and also one of the hardest to classify. He built no system, founded no school, and refused the labels “structuralist” and “postmodern.” What he left behind was a body of historical investigations so original that they rewrote the vocabulary of entire disciplines: what we now mean by “power,” “discourse,” “normalization,” and “surveillance” passed, in large part, through his pages. This article traces the core of his thought: the archaeological and genealogical method, the thesis that power and knowledge are inseparable, and the analysis of disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. ...

Few philosophers have been as decisive — and at the same time as badly misunderstood — as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His name instantly evokes a formula, “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” that he almost never used, and a vocabulary so dense that generations of readers gave up on the first page. Yet behind the difficulty lies one of the most ambitious ideas in the history of thought: that reality, history, and thinking itself obey a single movement, and that this movement can be understood. To understand Hegel is to understand what it means to think dialectically — and why, two centuries later, Marxists, existentialists, critical theorists, and political philosophers are still arguing with him. ...

“Man is condemned to be free.” Few sentences sum up a philosopher so well, and few have been so often repeated and so badly understood. Jean-Paul Sartre was the public face of twentieth-century existentialism — novelist, playwright, militant, and intellectual celebrity — but behind the media figure lies a rigorous philosophical system built on an ontology of consciousness. This article focuses on the properly Sartrean theses: the distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself, the formula “existence precedes essence,” radical freedom and its weight, bad faith, and the experience of the Other. For an overview of the existentialist movement as a whole, see the dedicated article on existentialism. ...

When the Goths of Alaric sacked Rome in 410 — the city that for eight centuries had thought itself eternal — the ancient world felt the ground give way beneath its feet. It was in that climate of disorientation that a bishop from North Africa undertook, between intimate meditation and a theology of history, the work that would make him the greatest intellectual figure of late antiquity. Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo (354–430) lived on the frontier between two ages: trained in classical Greco-Roman rhetoric, he converted to Christianity and transformed the legacy of Plato and Plotinus into the philosophical idiom of the medieval West. In him, the search for truth ceased to be merely contemplation of the cosmos and became exploration of the inner life of the soul. ...

Imagine dropping a stone a thousand times, and a thousand times it falls. You are utterly certain it will fall on the thousand-and-first. But pause and ask: what, exactly, justifies that certainty? You have never seen the “necessity” of the stone’s falling — you have only seen stones falling. The leap from what has happened to what will happen seems obvious, yet when we examine it, no logical proof holds it up. This small abyss, opened by David Hume in the eighteenth century, has never quite been closed. It swallows causation, induction, the self, and much of metaphysics — and it is the best place to start understanding why Hume is perhaps the most unsettling of modern philosophers. ...

There is an experience you may already have had in front of a text by Derrida: the feeling that the words keep slipping away, that the argument folds back on itself, that the author seems more interested in unsettling the ground than in building a thesis. That impression is no accident, nor a failure of exposition — it is, in large measure, the point. Derrida did not want to propose a new doctrine of truth or language to add to the long list philosophy has already produced. He wanted to show that the very ambition of fixing a final meaning, full and present to itself, is the fragile presupposition on which the whole Western tradition was built — and that this presupposition does not hold. ...

Some philosophers build systems, and some demolish the ground on which systems are built. Gilles Deleuze did both at once. His work is, on one hand, among the most ambitious metaphysical undertakings of the twentieth century — an ontology of difference and multiplicity that aims to rewrite the entire history of Western philosophy. On the other, it is a war machine directed against the way Western thought has always pictured itself: against the primacy of identity, resemblance, and representation. Deleuze did not want to add one more doctrine to the catalogue; he wanted to change the very image of what it means to think. And he did so by forging a vocabulary of his own — difference in itself, the virtual, rhizome, body without organs, plane of immanence — that made his books at once fascinating and notoriously difficult. ...

Few nineteenth-century thinkers cast a longer shadow over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than Karl Marx. Philosopher, economist, journalist and militant, Marx did not merely found a philosophical school: he supplied a vocabulary — class, ideology, surplus value, mode of production — that seeped into sociology, history, economics and cultural criticism, even among authors who reject him. This article focuses on three axes of his mature thought: historical materialism, the critique of political economy and the theory of ideology. Alienation, the central concept of the young Marx, is the subject of a separate study, and is mentioned here only where indispensable. ...

Some philosophers build systems; others dynamite them. Søren Kierkegaard belongs to the second group — but with a decisive difference: what he wanted to rescue from the rubble of the great Hegelian edifice was not another theory, but the single individual who exists, suffers, decides, and dies. Against the ambition to explain the whole of reality from a single concept, he set an apparently modest yet abyssal question: what does it mean, for me, to exist? ...