Bertrand Russell wrote 51 articles for the English-language supplement of the Jewish Daily Forward—a significant output, even for a writer so prolific. The association was productive but short lived, spanning just four-and-a-half unsettled years of inter-war history. His first submission, in May 1926 attacked the British Government’s handling of a bitter labour dispute that culminated…
In 1951, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt published “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” her 600-page twin study of Nazism and Stalinism. The book received rave reviews; Norman Podhoretz, the Jewish New York intellectual, compared it to an epic poem. Then, 66 years later, in December of last year, Arendt’s book began selling at 16 times its…
In what read like a homily inspired by an acid trip, Emory University philosophy professor George Yancy channeled the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Abraham Joshua Heschel in a rambling but strangely moving New York Times op-ed published Monday. The essay, titled “Is Your God Dead?”, asks the reader to look at one’s own beliefs…
I’m struck by the punitive nature of the new White House budget proposal on the poor — which involves cutting $274 billion over ten years from anti-poverty programs like food stamps, tax credits and welfare, as well as austere reforms on Medicaid and disability insurance while boosting military spending. All of the early quotes commenting…
Today in the world of glorious web discoveries, I saw on the OpenCulture twitter account a link to an interview between jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida. At first glance, it’s a seemingly random, bizarre, pairing, but something about it, on a gut level, just makes sense. And throughout their short conversation,…
“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA’s double strand architecture, wrote in his 1994 book on consciousness, “The Astonishing Hypothesis.”…
On this side of the Atlantic, the imminent publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (“Schwarzen Hefte”) has caused few if any ripples. For better or worse, the philosopher who theorized about “absence from the world” has been largely absent from our world. Yet in Europe, a surf-like pounding in newspapers and magazines has…
Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, the man behind some of the most influential theories of law and morality in modern jurisprudence, died on Thursday. He was 81. His family said in a statement that Dworkin died of leukaemia in London early in the morning. He is survived by his wife, two children and two grandchildren. Dworkin,…
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