Contemporary Philosophy

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Imagine that all of Western philosophy, from Parmenides to Heidegger, had committed the same fundamental gesture: reducing what is different to what is identical, absorbing the strange into the familiar, converting the Other into an object of my knowledge. This is the charge that runs through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995). Against a tradition that made the question of being its supreme concern, Lévinas asserts something apparently simple and radically subversive: prior to ontology there is ethics. Before I understand the world, I am already bound by a face that looks at me and says “thou shalt not kill.” ...

A Silent Moral Revolution In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation — a book that would become one of the philosophically most practically impactful texts of the twentieth century, giving decisive impetus to the animal rights movement and motivating legislative changes in several countries. The central thesis is at once simple and radical: the exclusion of non-human animals from full moral consideration has no rational justification — it is a form of prejudice comparable to racism and sexism. ...

The Birth of a Field The term bioethics was coined by oncologist and biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter in 1971, in his book Bioethics: Bridge to the Future. For Potter, bioethics was a synthetic discipline bridging the biological sciences and human values — a “bridge” capable of guiding humanity in the face of risks that technological progress posed to the survival of the species and the ecosystem. Potter conceived bioethics broadly, in an almost environmental sense, encompassing the relationship between human beings and the entire biosphere. ...

The Problem of Ethics in the Technological Age Philosophical ethics, from the Greeks to Kant, was elaborated for a world of limited human reach. Human actions affected the immediate surroundings — the polis, the family, one’s contemporaries. The distant future and non-human nature remained outside the scope of moral consideration: they were domains of theology, cosmology, or simply immutable givens of the setting in which ethics operated. The technological development of the twentieth century radically altered this picture. The human capacity for action — to transform, destroy, and create — acquired planetary scale and a temporal reach extending across generations. The atomic bomb, genetic engineering, global ecological degradation: these realities pose ethical problems that available traditions were simply never designed to address. ...

Technology and Ethics: An Old Relationship, A New Problem Ethical concern about technological power is not new. In the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener — MIT mathematician and founder of cybernetics — devoted the book The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) to reflecting on the moral and social implications of automated machines. Wiener warned of the risks of systems that, once in operation, produce consequences independent of their creators’ original intentions, and of the possibility that automation would generate mass unemployment and concentration of power. ...

The history of Western philosophy can be read, without exaggeration, as the history of the forgetting of being. This is the thesis that runs through the entire work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — arguably the most influential and most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century. Being and Time (1927), his magnum opus, did not propose yet another theory about the world, the mind, or morality: it proposed that philosophy as a whole — from Plato to Nietzsche — had left its most fundamental question unthought: what does it mean to be? ...

There is an experience that every serious reader has had at least once: opening a book written centuries ago — Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ Discourse on Method — and realizing that the text still says something. It does not say the same thing it said to its author or to its contemporaries, of course. It says something different, something born from the encounter between what the text carries and what we bring. The question is: what exactly happens in that encounter? How is it possible for a text from the past to speak to the present without the present simply distorting it? And more radically: what does it mean, after all, to understand? ...