
What comes after liberalism? In some sense for centuries, and most definitely for the past several decades, Western politics have been shaped by a largely presupposed consensus towards liberalism—an ideology founded upon individual autonomy, procedural neutrality, and technocratic governance. But today, cracks are widening in presumed foundation. Whether in the erosion of public trust, the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the nature, significance, and importance of authentic play. What does it mean to play? Though we are all acquainted with play from an early age, we might be hard-pressed nonetheless to define it. On the one hand, it seems something common to higher animals: not only our pets—dogs and cats—but […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the meaning of the postliberal, the postmodern, and the postacademic—and what we signify by “post-”. We do not think often enough about the meanings of words, especially those that have entered into the popular lexicon. The term ‘postmodern’ provides a good example of this unthinking, and in two ways. First […]

If you and I are to have a conversation—that is, a kind of living-together through discourse or the concrete articulations of language—we must, indeed, do so in the same “place”. Put otherwise, we cannot have a conversation unless the objects signified by our words are the same. I do not mean that each and every […]

Written by an anonymous author in the late 14th century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight continues to entice the human spirit: drawing us toward something grand, mysterious, and—perhaps most of all—towards the betterment of our own virtue. The titular hero, captured in poetic verse, exemplifies chivalry. Sir Gawain demonstrates courage, piety, courtesy, honesty, honor, […]

As the world grew into and through modernity, and technology shrank the distances between centers of civilization, the very nature of culture itself became an explicit philosophical question: most especially when technology produced in the wider reaches of communication something akin to a “global consciousness”: an awareness of people and their cultures all across the […]