Articles

We live surrounded by tools, machines, systems and algorithms with such familiarity that we rarely ask what technology actually is. It tends to appear as a neutral set of means at the disposal of ends we freely choose: a hammer, a power plant, a smartphone are all supposedly “just tools” — good or bad depending on how we use them. The philosophy of technology begins precisely from the suspicion that this neutrality is a comfortable illusion. Since antiquity, but with unprecedented urgency from the twentieth century onward, a lineage of thinkers — from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Ellul to Mumford — has insisted that technology is not an indifferent means to human ends, but a way of being in the world that shapes in advance what we count as real, as nature, as truth, and even as human. ...

What does it mean to form a human being? Few questions run through the history of philosophy with such persistence — and few have consequences so immediate for the life of every person and every society. Is educating a matter of leading someone out of ignorance, or of helping them develop what they already carry within? Is it shaping character according to a model, or freeing a capacity to judge for oneself? This article traces the main philosophical answers to these questions, from Greek paideia to contemporary pedagogies, passing through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Comenius, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Dewey, and Freire. ...

Does history have a meaning? A thread, a direction, perhaps even a law governing the succession of empires, revolutions, and ideas — or is history merely, as Macbeth put it, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? This apparently simple question actually conceals two very different questions, and confusing them accounts for much of the muddle surrounding “philosophy of history.” The first question is speculative: what is the meaning, the motor, or the law of the historical process as a whole? The second is critical or epistemological: how do we know the past, what kind of science (if any) history is, and what it means to “understand” a human event. This article traces the most influential answers to the first question — from Augustine to Fukuyama — and shows how, in the twentieth century, the second question turned against the first, in a movement of suspicion running from Dilthey to Popper and Lyotard. ...

Few philosophers have been so widely read and so widely misread as Friedrich Nietzsche. Reduced, in certain popular accounts, to a prophet of “anything goes,” or worse, hijacked by Nazi propaganda that his own sister helped fabricate, Nietzsche in fact built one of the most rigorous and most affirmative philosophical structures of the nineteenth century — a thought that does not settle for diagnosing the crisis of Western values but proposes, out of that very crisis, a task: to create new values, to say yes to life as it is, with its suffering and its joy, without the consolation of metaphysical worlds or compensatory afterlives. We have already discussed Nietzsche’s nihilistic diagnosis and its resonance with contemporary society in a separate article — Nietzsche and Nihilism. This piece covers the other side of the same coin: the positive core of his philosophy, from his early writings on Greek tragedy to the most discussed — and most distorted — notions in his thought: will to power, eternal recurrence, and the overman. ...

Every argument tries to convince us of something on the strength of something else: from certain premises, a conclusion is drawn. But what makes that move legitimate? Why does “all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal” strike us as impeccable, while “some swans are white; this animal is a swan; therefore this animal is white” does not? The answer to that question — what makes a piece of reasoning hold — is the business of logic, one of philosophy’s oldest and most technically demanding disciplines. Born as a reflection on the art of demonstration and debate, logic has traveled twenty-five centuries to become, in the twentieth, a formal science capable of clarifying — and also of exposing the limits of — mathematical reason itself. ...

In a world where good actions produce disastrous results and base actions yield prosperity, what can still be called good without qualification? Immanuel Kant answered that question with a clarity that has unsettled moral philosophy for more than two centuries: only the good will deserves to be called an unconditioned good. Not talent, not courage, not even happiness — for all of these can be turned toward wicked ends. Only the will that acts out of pure respect for the moral law, independently of its consequences, possesses moral worth in itself. From this inaugural insight, Kant constructed, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), the most ambitious and most contested ethical architecture of modernity. ...

You have made a promise you cannot keep without harming a third party. Should you honor it, or break it to prevent the harm? A judge knows that convicting an innocent person will calm a crowd that would otherwise riot and kill twenty people. Should he sacrifice the innocent one? There is no easy answer — and it is precisely that discomfort which reveals why moral philosophy needs theories. There are three great families of response to the question “what makes an action morally right?”: consequentialism, which looks to outcomes; deontology, which looks to duties and rules; and virtue ethics, which looks to the character of the agent. Understanding how each thinks, where each succeeds, and where each stumbles is the minimum map for any serious ethical debate. ...

Some questions philosophy inherits from every generation without ever returning them resolved. The question of time is, perhaps, the most stubborn of all. Augustine, in Confessions (Book XI), stated the paradox with a clarity that no subsequent philosopher has managed to surpass: “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.” The difficulty is not rhetorical. Time is the condition of everything that exists — change, causality, memory, anticipation — and precisely because it is so pervasive, it escapes any attempt to define it from the outside, as though it were an object among others. This article traces the main knots in the contemporary metaphysics of time: McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, the debate between presentism and eternalism, the theory of temporal passage, Bergson’s durée, and the asymmetry between past and future. ...

When a mathematician states that 2 + 2 = 4, the claim seems indubitably true. But what exactly makes it true? Does the number 2 exist somewhere — in a Platonic realm, on a sheet of paper as a symbol, or as a construction of the mind? And how do we come to know mathematical truths without observing any empirical fact? These questions, deceptively simple at first glance, lie at the heart of one of philosophy’s most demanding fields: the philosophy of mathematics. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they ceased to be peripheral speculation and became an intellectual emergency, triggering one of the most fertile crises in the history of thought — one whose reverberations still shape logic, computation, and contemporary philosophy of mind. ...

Can someone who is not a scholar by profession lead an intellectual life? The book that answered that question best in the twentieth century is short, practical, and almost austere: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Its Conditions, Its Methods, published in 1921 by the Dominican friar Antonin Sertillanges. More than a hundred years later it is still read — entirely outside any religious context — as the finest manual of the ethics and discipline of study ever written. This article surveys its central theses, following the very structure announced in its subtitle: the spirit, the conditions, and the methods of intellectual work. ...

At the heart of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) there is a chapter that took on a life of its own and became one of the most discussed texts in political philosophy, theology, and literature: “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a “poem” — so its fictional author calls it — that condenses, in a few pages, the most formidable objection ever made against human freedom. This article examines it from within: its plot, its argumentative architecture, and the layers of reading that have made it inexhaustible. ...

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was not a philosopher in the technical sense: he wrote no treatises, built no system, and defined no concepts with scholarly rigor. And yet few thinkers have marked twentieth-century philosophy as deeply. The reason is that his novels work as laboratories of ideas: instead of demonstrating theses, he embodies them in characters and pushes them to their last consequences, making them collide with one another. This article lays out the philosophy that pulses behind his works — the defense of freedom against calculating reason, nihilism and its abyss, the problem of evil, and the answer of faith. ...

A runaway trolley is hurtling toward five people tied to the track. You are standing beside a lever that can divert it onto a side track — where there is only one person. Pull the lever? Most people say yes. Now a different scene: there is no lever, but you are on a footbridge beside a large man; pushing him onto the track would stop the trolley and save the five. Most people, now, refuse. Why is five-for-one acceptable in one case and repugnant in the other, if the arithmetic is the same? This is the most famous form of the trolley problem — perhaps the best-known thought experiment in ethics. ...

Can we know anything? Skepticism is the current that takes this question seriously — and, in its most radical versions, answers no, or at least that we have no way of knowing. More than an attitude of casual doubt, it is a position (and, in antiquity, a way of life) that became the great engine of epistemology: much of the theory of knowledge was born of the attempt to answer the skeptical challenge. This article surveys its ancient and modern forms and the main responses it has received. ...

Few moral theories have been as influential — and as attacked — as utilitarianism. Its central idea is disarmingly simple: the right action is the one that produces the greatest amount of well-being for the greatest number of those affected. Born as a reforming philosophy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, it shaped criminal law, welfare economics, public policy and, more recently, animal ethics and the fight against global poverty. This article lays out its structure, its main authors, and the objections that dog it. ...

Few questions are as immediate and as difficult as this one: does life have a meaning? It can erupt in a sleepless night, in grief, or in the tedium of a routine, and it challenges believer and skeptic alike. Though ancient in substance — it runs through Ecclesiastes, the Stoics, and Augustine — it became an explicit and technically worked topic of philosophy only recently. This article surveys its main formulations: the crisis of cosmic meaning, pessimism, Camus’s absurd, Nagel’s ironic response, and the analytic turn that distinguishes the meaning of life from meaning in life. ...

Feminism is not a single doctrine but a heterogeneous family of theories and movements — often in tension with one another — that share the claim that the relations between the sexes involve inequalities deserving critical examination. As an object of philosophical study, it is also one of the most contested fields in contemporary thought: it is internally divided into currents that disagree about the diagnosis, the causes, and the remedies, and it draws vigorous objections from outside. This article maps the history (the model of “waves”), the main currents, the central concepts, and — with particular attention — the criticisms feminism has met, from within and from without. ...

In the late 1960s, the structuralist confidence in stable systems began to crack from within. The thinkers who pushed structuralism to its limit — Jacques Derrida, the Michel Foucault of genealogy, Gilles Deleuze, the late Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva — came to be known (above all in the Anglophone academy) as post-structuralists. Around the same time, a broader diagnosis took shape: that of a postmodern condition. Two French philosophers gave it its most influential formulations — Jean-François Lyotard, with his incredulity toward the grand narratives, and Jean Baudrillard, with the hyperreal and the simulacrum. This article traces the post-structuralist moment and the debate over the postmodern. ...

For roughly two decades — from the 1950s to the early 1970s — a single idea reorganized the French human sciences and, by extension, much of Western thought: the idea that the most varied human phenomena (language, kinship, myth, fashion, the unconscious, ideology) must be understood as systems of relations — as structures — and not as collections of isolated things, nor as products of an individual consciousness. This was structuralism: less a unified doctrine than a method and an intellectual climate, exported from linguistics to anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This article follows that path, from Saussure to his heirs, up to the post-structuralist turn that pushed it to its limit. ...

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the revolution was expected to spread across industrialized Europe. It did not: the German and Hungarian uprisings of 1918–1919 were crushed, and Western capitalism survived. Out of that defeat was born one of the richest traditions of twentieth-century thought — Western Marxism. Faced with the failure of revolution in the West and the hardening of Soviet Marxism into a state dogma, a group of thinkers reopened the questions that orthodoxy had closed: why did the masses not rebel? How do culture, ideology, and consciousness sustain domination? What place do philosophy and aesthetics have in political struggle? This article surveys that tradition, from its founders in 1923 to Althusser’s structural turn. ...