Essay What’s Joe Biden’s role in politics now? July 24, 2024 In April 2020, when Joe Biden had effectively won his party’s nomination to challenge incumbent US President Donald Trump in the coming election and political commentators had begun to fret about both candidates’ ages, I consulted Plutarch of Chaeronea to get his advice about old men engaging in politics. Read More
Essay Ovid’s 38 recommendations for getting over a breakup July 10, 2024 Ever gone through a breakup? You’re not alone. In the year 1 CE, the Roman poet Ovid published a poem titled "Remedies for Love", and it suggests that relationships haven’t changed much in two thousand years. Read More
Essay Liberalism may be the source of your soul June 14, 2024 The most obvious and important realities can sometimes be the hardest to think and talk about. Read More
Podcast How to Be Queer June 14, 2024 How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. Read More
Essay Why we practice magic April 11, 2024 Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers wrote extensive treatises on the topic. Read More
Podcast Listen in: The Weirdness of the World January 22, 2024 Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? Read More
Podcast How to Be Healthy January 22, 2024 The second-century Greek physician Galen—the most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates—is a central figure in Western medicine. Read More
Essay New year, old problems January 10, 2024 The struggle against distraction might seem utterly specific to the twenty-first century, but it was in fact singled out as a crisis more than a millennium and a half ago. Read More
Podcast Chinese Cosmopolitanism January 08, 2024 Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. Read More
Essay Galen and health: Inspiration, caution, and some useful advice January 02, 2024 What use to today’s physicians is the writing of Galen, an educated but pompous and (we now see, in 2023) misguided healer who lived 1,800 years ago? Read More
Essay Aristotle and ecology October 12, 2023 Aristotle urges us to study animals closely for what they reveal about the larger world around us, including ourselves. Read More
Interview Myisha Cherry on Failures of Forgiveness September 28, 2023 Forgiveness is one way at repair. It is not the only way. Forgiveness can never reach repair by itself. It requires work from community members as well as victims and wrongdoers. Read More
Essay Plato the constitutionalist—and the Supreme Court July 27, 2023 A cabal of unelected men and women appointed with tenure for life, making the most important decisions for an entire society with no chance of appeal. That is a good description of the United States Supreme Court. It’s also a good description of the philosopher-rulers of Plato’s Republic. Read More
Interview In dialogue: Rethinking climate change and catastrophe July 18, 2023 This month, in pursuit of clarity and advice, we gathered some of our authors and asked the following question: How should we think about the future in the face of climate change? Their perspectives offer us the tools to collectively rethink catastrophe in order to generate alternative possibilities of hope, action, or simple awareness regarding the planet and its beings. Read More
Essay Aristotelian virtues for social media June 23, 2023 There was no social media in Aristotle’s day. But a trio of virtues Aristotle invokes for social situations—and their corresponding vices—nicely capture the landscape of human (mis)behavior on the social media of today. Read More