https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benedictus_Spinoza._Line_engraving_by_W._Pobuda_after_(A._P._Wellcome_V0005578.jpg

Nice Guy Spinoza Finishes…First?

The Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza died in 1677, which is when the battle to define his life—and work—began.
illustration of a woman's body on abstract blob background

Do You Own Your Body?

The idea that our bodies are our own may be intuitive, but when it comes to market transactions like surrogacy, our beliefs and feelings get more complicated.
Albert Camus in the garden of his Paris studio, 1952.

The Existentialism of Style vs. Substance

Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir were misread, misunderstood, and misperceived by English-speaking readers due to interventions of publishers and editors.
Marguerite Agniel, c. 1928

Religion of the Devil, Philosophy of the Coiled Serpent

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.
An animation of a cat that shifts between the cat being alive and the cat being dead

Why Do We Love Thinking About Schrödinger’s Cat?

In physics, the whole point of the thought experiment is that it’s absurd. But in literature, it’s been used to explore all sorts of ideas and possibilities.
Image showing the sixty-four hexagrams from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

The I Ching in America

Europeans translated the Chinese Book of Changes in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
Christ's Descent into Hell by Hieronymus Bosch

Fire and Brimstone

If our conception of hell was absent from Christianity at the time the religion was born, whence exactly does it hail?
Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

The European MonEUlith: Nietzsche and Nationalism

What can Nietzche’s geophilosophical modes of thought offer us for understanding globalization in his time and pan-European politics today?
A study of facial expression and gesture, 1823

How Upper Lips Got Stiff

The truism that “boys don’t cry” is a Western social convention. Colonialism and imperialism made sure it spread East.
Adam Smith

Adam Smith, Revolutionary?

By 1800, Smith—once considered a friend of the poor and an enemy of the privileges of the rich—was already being refashioned into a icon of conservatism.