Habermas on the Legitimacy of Lockdown
Habermas argued that the state’s duty to protect life outweighed all individual rights. His critics accused him of authoritarianism.
Gianni Vattimo Interview
Gianni Vattimo is considered to be among the most important living European philosophers, alongside Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas. Known for his interpretation of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies, he also developed a postmodern theory he calls "weak thought," meant to question the hard objectivity of claims in religion, politics, and ...
The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer
Diagnosing American Politics
What the rise of Trump says about American democracy
I have a morbid fascination with Carl Schmitt. Morbid, because he manages to condense, in his political theory and philosophy of law, pretty much everything I find repulsive about the radical right. His pessimism about “human nature” is raw and simplistic and, unlike Hobbes, whom he superficially resembles, ...
The German Geist Dwells Nowhere
The turmoil surrounding Heidegger’s Black Notebooks achieved new heights recently, with Freiburg University’s announcement that its legendary Heidegger Lehrstuhl would be abolished and converted to a junior professorship in logic (!) and analytic philosophy, as if to deliberately obliterate Heidegger’s legacy. Apparently, the Lehrstuhl has become too controversial. This decision may well ...
Critical Theory After the Anthropocene
Heidegger and Geology
Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Extreme Silencing
The Black Notebooks (Die Schwarzen Hefte), containing Martin Heidegger’s assorted thoughts from the 1930s and 40s, throw new light on the self-aggrandizement into totalitarianism of the most German of all philosophers.
The Freiburg professor of philosophy was not yet 50 years old when, in 1937 and 1938, he retraced ...