Grant Farred examines Martin Heidegger’s paradoxical claim that we do not know what thinking is, but can recognize when we are not thinking. Heidegger's claim is that thinking emerges through speaking, not prior to it. Moreover, thinking begins in negation and requires awareness of our failure to think. By unsettling everyday assumptions, Heidegger reframes thinking as an active, reflective practice that demands attentiveness to language and a conscious effort to avoid unthin

This essay explores Marx’s break from philosophy, arguing that his materialism emerges from a commitment to understanding and transforming real social life. Rejecting both idealism and traditional materialism, Marx develops a theory centered on practical, sensuous human activity embedded in historical social relations. By prioritizing lived reality over abstract thought, he moves beyond philosophy toward a revolutionary framework aimed at grasping and changing the conditions

Deric Carner frames art as an embodied practice rooted in touch, repetition, and material play rather than detached intellect. His chaotic studio becomes a site where forms emerge through intuition and experimentation. Rejecting rigid planning, he treats materials as active collaborators, allowing accidents and physical engagement to guide meaning. Art, for him, is not conceived fully in the mind but discovered through the body’s interaction with the world.

In this follow-up essay, Mary Peterson examines how legal aggression, online misogyny, and public relations battles shape contemporary responses to accusations of sexual misconduct. Drawing on high-profile cases and philosophical debates, she argues that the legal system often amplifies harm rather than healing. Restorative justice, she suggests, offers an alternative framework focused on accountability, community responsibility, and the repair of damaged lives.

Liam Gillick explores the inescapable entanglement of contemporary art and philosophy. Through the figures of two fictional artists — one claiming to escape theory, the other striving to inhabit it — he reveals a paradox: artists are always both inside and outside philosophical discourse. He shows how both remain caught within philosophy’s terrain. Contemporary art thrives in this tension, endlessly “becoming” - navigating between guiding theories and open creative terrain.

What does it mean to call our era the Anthropocene, an age defined by “humanity” as a geological force? This essay interrogates that name and the universal “we” it assumes. Tracing the entanglements of colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism and environmental extraction, it offers a philosophical counterhistory of the human and its others. Drawing on decolonial thought and philosophical genealogy, it asks whether rethinking our past might open the possibility of a more just e

This essay advances a Marxist feminist claim that the family is the capitalist form of appearance of unwaged reproductive labour. Using a Hegelian-Marxist method centered on capital’s necessary appearances, it shows how the family mystifies, privatizes, and extracts reproductive labour. Revisiting Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it argues that the family is necessitated by capital and concludes by calling for its abolition and the socialization of reproductive

In this review, Nishok G U discusses Ben Ware's book, On Extinction, which reimagines contemporary crises like climate collapse and political stagnation not as apocalyptic ends but as opportunities for radical renewal. Ware suggests that real transformation requires confronting 'the end' directly, embracing a process of 'revolutionary decreation'. But the review also highlights the unresolved tensions in Ware’s approach, particularly with regard to the question of political v

This essay explores the unstable boundary between nature and culture, showing how science, philosophy, and politics continually reshape what we call 'natural'. It shows how we continually reinterpret natural phenomena through cultural lenses and how this distortion shapes public responses to the climate crisis, turning a stark natural threat into a cultural dispute. It argues that truly confronting climate change requires rethinking what we mean by nature itself.

In this conversation, Vanessa Wills explores the moral heart of Marxism. Challenging the view of Marx as a cold materialist, Wills reveals his deep ethical vision, one that is grounded in freedom, creativity, and collective self-determination. She argues that revolution is not chaos but humanity’s conscious effort to overcome alienation and shape a just world, where moral and historical progress unite in the struggle for genuine emancipation.

Miranda Anderson reviews Resistance, the exhibition and book, that explores a century of protest through photography. It captures the power of collective action and the persistence of hope. Moving from the Suffragettes to the Anti-Iraq War movement, Anderson reflects on how art, activism, and imagination can counter resignation in an age of digital distraction and rekindle belief in transformative change.

It is often thought that Marx, despite starting out as a philosopher, sought to break with philosophy in order to carry out his mature work. In this essay, Christoph Schuringa argues that Marx's overall project, culminating in Capital, is not concerned with replacing philosophy with some other enquiry, but to raise philosophy itself to its highest power and to actualize it. As a philosopher, Marx, far from carrying out any derivative work, sought to surpass his predecessors s