This is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The […] | Continue reading
Fascination with the relationship between knowledge and power never dies. | Continue reading
If you wanted to know what was really going on, you had to get on Urbit. | Continue reading
There’s an old joke I tell sometimes when I try to explain philosophy to people outside academia. It’s about a drunk fumbling about under a […] | Continue reading
Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name […] | Continue reading
One of the wonders of modern academia is that the ideal of workplace democracy should be so prevalent among people who regularly endure faculty meetings. […] | Continue reading
This is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. These words exist for you to read them. I […] | Continue reading
My acceptance of philosophy as a way of living never transformed into a source of worldly comfort, and the unsettling gap between thinking and living never closed. | Continue reading
What is complaint, and what would it mean to see it as “infallible”? | Continue reading
It’s a little-known fact that Camus worked briefly as a meteorologist. | Continue reading
This is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Racism doesn’t tend to make me angry. You might […] | Continue reading
This is part of a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The […] | Continue reading
Where so many postmodernist writers envisaged a range of possible futures, Gaddis dreamt of an unbroken past that would render his satire unnecessary. | Continue reading
Along with George’s Selected Letters, Meaning a Life is the only prose account of the Oppens’ composite life as they understood it. Inside that story Mary has nested another—a rare story of imagination, companionship and love becoming mysteriously and beautifully aligned. | Continue reading
The lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that an emancipatory politics is indeed possible, but also fragile and precarious—and under constant threat by the logic of dismissal. | Continue reading
Before the 1970s, the word “parent” was commonly used only as a noun; since that time, American parents have roughly doubled the amount of time they spend parenting, and each generation since seems to stress more about parenting than the previous one. | Continue reading
There are many versions of Bill Withers, the steady, complicated singer who died last week from a heart attack, at age 81. There is the […] | Continue reading
What the COVID-19 period has revealed about Turkey, the government as well as the people, is a conflicted state of mind. | Continue reading
Without ever rejecting public schooling, we have found ourselves in a natural experiment in Lockean and Rousseauian aims. | Continue reading
These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual. | Continue reading
One of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s: their projects of “becoming” are the most particularized of all. | Continue reading
I’m writing this right now two hundred feet up in the air on top of a part of the oil refinery that makes polypropylene plastic. | Continue reading
We seem to be less interested in either of these games than in exploring the connection between them—or rather, the philosophical question to which that connection points. | Continue reading
We seem to be less interested in either of these games than in exploring the connection between them—or rather, the philosophical question to which that connection points. | Continue reading
This is the eleventh in a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Twenty-five years ago a secretary made a mistake, … | Continue reading
I committed my first academic crime at the age of six. | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. In addition to his recent book, Irrationality: … | Continue reading
It is hard to speak about parenting without at the same time seeking validation as a parent. | Continue reading
When my oldest son was born, fifteen years ago, one of the gifts we received was a giant clay bowl made in the shape of the artist’s pregnant belly. | Continue reading
When my identical twin, Julia, came to visit recently, I took her to my favorite café for a coffee and a waffle. As we settled into our drinks, I glanced at the barista, a… | Continue reading
Perhaps like me you occasionally find yourself scanning the professional autobiographies of other people. Opening the CVs of strangers with whom you have only faintly tangential relationships and scrolling down, far down. I feel… | Continue reading
This is the sixth in a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. In a 1989 article in the medical journal Pediatrics, Bruce McIntosh introduces the term “spoiled child… | Continue reading
This article is in part a response to Agnes Callard’s column, “Persuade or Be Persuaded,” which discussed the recent labor action at the University of Chicago, in which hundreds of graduate students withheld their… | Continue reading
This is the fifth in a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. I write to the sound of drums beating and people chanting just outside my window. The… | Continue reading
This is the fourth in a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. We live in a glorious era of podcasting, public conversation and boundary-crossing interest in niche academic… | Continue reading
In November, Politico published a profile of Claire Lehmann, the founder of the web magazine Quillette, which it hailed as the “unofficial digest” of the intellectual dark web. While acknowledging that many of the… | Continue reading
To disagree too much is to be disagreeable. The trouble for philosophers is that disagreeing is one of life’s higher pleasures. | Continue reading
Love has become too difficult, because sex has become too easy. | Continue reading
It might seem that there is not much left to say regarding Elif Batuman’s debut novel: since its release in March of last year The Idiot has received generous coverage from nearly every literary-oriented… | Continue reading
This essay appears in a special symposium on intellectuals, which is entirely composed of essays by the editors of The Point. Click here to read all of the essays from the symposium. In 1964, when… | Continue reading