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Drucilla Cornell: The ‘Enabling Violation’ of International Adoption
Defining adoption as “trauma” betrays a prejudice in favor of the traditional heterosexual family.
The Stone: Occupy Wall Streets Political Disobedience
The Wall Street protests represent a refusal to engage the worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War.
The Stone: Will the Aliens Be Nice? Don’t Bet On It
By Gary Gutting, … But we do know this: for the foreseeable future, contact with ETI would have to result from their coming here, which would in all likelihood mean… Read more
Times Higher Education – Out of the shadows
W.G. Sebald, stifled by the culture of silence in post-war Germany, by ‘people’s ability to forget what they do not want to know’, settled in 1960s England and wrote groundbreaking… Read more
Costica Brandatan, Philosophy As an Art of Dying – NYTimes.com
It happens rarely, but when it does it causes a commotion of great proportions; it attracts the attention of all, becomes a popular topic for discussion and debate in marketplaces… Read more
Philosophers Zone – The Julian Assange Conspiracy
The object of Wikileaks is to dismantle the conspiracies that, according to its founder, rule the world. But what is a conspiracy and are you part of one? According… Read more
Andre Glucksmann: Revolution without guarantee
Since January 2011 inevitability has ceased to exist in Maghreb and the Middle East. Whatever happens next, we welcome the upheaval with “a taking of sides according to desires which… Read more
Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking | Peter Hallward
In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to “think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make… Read more
Audio: Philosophers Zone – 12 February 2011 – Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb
The Society of the Muslim Brothers, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned in Egypt for many years. Nevertheless, after the recent upheavals, the Brotherhood was among the… Read more
More philosophers on Egypt
Bert Olivier, Egypt: The crisis of modernity all over again? Slavoj Zizek, For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square Eric Schliesser, Egypt and China And of course Graham… Read more
Why Bouazizi burning set Arab world afire – CSMonitor.com
Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of self-immolation triggered a shame in many Arabs that they hadn’t done enough for their dignity and freedom, igniting protests for democracy. Under what conditions… Read more
In Egypt and Tunisia the will of the people is not a hollow cliche | Peter Hallward
The day after popular pressure forced Tunisia’s autocratic president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power on 14 January, Egypt’s government declared that it “respects the will of the Tunisian people”…. Read more
Benjamin Kunkel: Marx’s Return
The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted a shallow revival of Marxism. During the panicky period between the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the official end… Read more
Loughner’s Nietzsche: Why the philosopher is misunderstood by angry young men
Angry Nerds How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types. By Matt Feeney Posted Friday, Jan. 14, 2011, at 11:22 AM ET Friedrich Nietzsche If we never discovered that Jared… Read more
The best boring books | Books | guardian.co.uk
Robert McCrum has a list of top ten best boring books. Only Marx makes it from philosophy! “There’s no Blitz today, of course,and it’s difficult to recapture or conjure up… Read more
Coen Brothers and Wittgenstein
Nearly 30 years before brother filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen released their new film True Grit, the younger sibling, Ethan, wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on the works of… Read more
LRB · Eliot Weinberger · ‘Damn right,’ I said
In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the… Read more
The death of universities | Terry Eagleton | The Guardian
Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question is absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear from pubs, or egoism from Hollywood…. Read more
NY Times: Lady Power
Lady Power By NANCY BAUER Nancy Bauer is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Tufts University. If you want to get a bead on the state of feminism these… Read more
Europe is a dead political project | Étienne Balibar | guardian.co.uk
Europe is a dead political project This is the beginning of the end for the EU unless it can find the capacity to start again on radically new bases via… Read more