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Hegel: A Complete Guide to History
(pdf version) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has a good claim on being the most influential philosopher of all time. He is a philosopher of change, of progress, of history, of how our consciousness itself has changed, and, more than anything, of freedom itself. Every philosopher that came after him has drawn on or responded to…
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Introduction to Foucault
What is the human relationship to knowledge? How is it collected, organised, thought about, and in what ways does it have power over us? How does it shape us, mould our desires, discipline us? If Foucault’s argument had to be summed up in a crude way it would be this: that knowledge and power are…
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Introduction to Rawls: A Theory of Justice
The American philosopher John Rawls was one of the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and dying in 2002, he’s responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy. A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus, was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society…
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Introduction to Deleuze: Difference and Repetition
Gilles Deleuze, as Todd May puts it, is a philosopher of new possibilities, of ‘how we might think of things in ways that would open up new regions for living’. Most simply, he’s a philosopher of difference, of how things change and become different over time. For this reason, he is usually referred to as…
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Introduction to the History of Anarchism
Anarchism is a difficult ideology to define. And anarchism of a sorts was present in many movements and ideologies throughout history – from the Taoists in Ancient China through to the anarchism currently being practised in Rojava in Northern Syria, where communities are attempting to establish autonomous bottom-up direct democracies where anyone can vote on…
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An Introduction to Baudrillard
‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning’. Is it possible to lose contact with reality? To float away from the material world towards something else? What happens when real bodies can be replaced by holograms, when real food is replaced with perfect synthetics, when real…
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Kant: A Complete Guide to Reason
Immanuel Kant – one of the most influential, consequential, and ground-breaking philosophers in history – changed the way we think about what we’re all capable of. Each of us swim in the water of his philosophy – politically, morally, culturally. He changed everything. The course of history, us, our ways of thinking and acting. He…
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Do Culture Wars Matter?
I get emotional at films an embarrassing amount. Why? It’s bizarre if you think about it. These are imaginary people that I don’t know on a screen dealing with issues that I often have no experience of. Why are we moved by them? Even if you don’t get emotional, you’d probably agree that there is…
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Spinoza: A Complete Guide to Life
If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you’ll find. Today, you’ll discover how to see yourself as part of something bigger, something…
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Immanuel Kant: A Complete Guide to Reason
Immanuel Kant – one of the most influential, consequential, and ground-breaking philosophers in history – changed the way we think about we’re all capable of. Each of us swim in the water of his philosophy – politically, morally, culturally. He changed everything. The course of history, us, our ways of thinking and acting. He saw…
Then & Now
Human(itie)s, in context