Yearly Archives: 2026

Can the Historical Materialist Be a Woman? On the Woman Question in Walter Benjamin

This year I agreed to be a part of a translation project: alongside two fellow academics, the aim was to translate the fifty-something page...

Who Defends Democracy and On What Grounds?

Democracies have been in decline, and many scholars are now rightly asking how this process can be halted. Much of the research on democratic...

2022 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise

Below is the audio recording of Margaret Gilbert’s John Dewey Lecture, “Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise,” given at the 2022 Pacific Division...

Democratic Law in the State of Nature: A Kantian Reconstruction

A familiar puzzle sits at the heart of contemporary legal and political philosophy. On the one hand, rights are taken to exist prior to...

Depression as a Philosophical Problem: Rethinking the Meaning of Suffering in the Era of SSRIs

When I was sixteen, I was hospitalized for depression for six weeks and put on Prozac. At the time, I was taught that depression...

Evil in Narrative Fiction

Imagine you read Kant. You may disagree with him, you may be bored by his style, but you will persevere, for after all, he...

Socrates Would’ve Absolutely Adored ChatGPT

Go on, admit it—you use ChatGPT (or something like it) more than you are willing to admit. You use it for all sorts of...

Foraging Thoughts

Few joys in my childhood memory rival the picking of blackberries under the scorching Greek sun. The rising dust, the dry and hot wind,...

When Society Stops Knowing How to Know

Over the past two decades, we have watched the pillars of public knowledge gradually weaken. John Stuart Mill is probably turning in his grave...

APA Members Interview, Megan Craig

Megan Craig is an artist, essayist, and Associate Professor Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a...

Immanence All the Way Down (and Across): Horizontal Transcendence in First Reformed

Paul Schrader crafted his 2018 film First Reformed to be, among other things, an extended phenomenological argument that transcendence requires moving beyond the physical...

AI and Teaching: Inviting Reflections on Teaching in the Age of AI

In my recent discussion sections for Philosophy of Science at UCLA, we’ve been working through Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn famously lays...

Sisyphus in the Kitchen: The Tradwife Brand and the Closed Menu of Women’s Lives

Nostalgia, “Again,” and Who Gets to Count The slogan: “Make America Great Again” works by inviting us to long for a past that was ordered,...

Philosophy?! Here’s What to do with That

Students are not typically taught philosophy during their K-12 years, so few know what to expect when they sign up for my Introduction to...

2022 Pacific Division Presidential Address: Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation

Below is the audio recording of Seana Shiffrin’s presidential address, “Democratic Representation as Duty Delegation,” given at the 2022 Pacific Division Meeting. The full...