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

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.

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

This essay traces the global journey of Neoplatonism across Europe, Africa and Asia and how it evolved through encounters with Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. From its origins in Alexandria to its translation and reinterpretation in Ethiopia, the Islamic world and Mughal India, Neoplatonism was not simply transmitted, but was transformed. The essay reveals how a single philosophical system was reshaped across linguistic and cultural borders by those who engaged with it.

Hannah Arendt’s experiences of exile, from Nazi Germany to the U.S., shaped her reflections on statelessness, belonging, and the limits of the nation-state. In this essay, Anna Argirò explores Arendt's urgent call to rethink human rights, citizenship, and politics beyond borders. In a world of walls and displacement, her thought invites us to imagine a political community grounded not in exclusion, but in plurality, responsibility, and shared humanity.

What does it mean to truly forgive and when is it morally right to do so? In this essay, Luke Russell examines the remarkable case of Abdirashid Abdi, a refugee who forgave his attacker and advocated for her leniency. Russell challenges our assumptions about justice, asks whether forgiveness can coexist with punishment, if compassion might sometimes carry risks and what role victims play in shaping the moral landscape of accountability.

Alan Shepherd examines Bergson’s view of intuition as a key to metaphysical knowledge. Unlike Kant, Bergson believes we can directly access reality through our experience of time, or “duration.” Intuition expands through memory, evolution, and mystical insight, revealing a creative, loving force behind life. More than intellect, it offers deep, spiritual truths and reclaims metaphysics as a meaningful, ethical, and experiential pursuit.

In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer asked a deceptively simple question of animals: ‘Can they suffer?’ The implications launched a revolution in our thinking about animal rights and food ethics. But has animal suffering diminished in the fifty years since?

This essay critiques the moral and strategic failure of foreign-imposed regime change in Iran, arguing that such interventions paradoxically reinforce the Islamic Republic's legitimacy rooted in anti-imperialism. Drawing on post-colonial theory and historical precedent, Dabbagh and Hassan call for “solidaristic non-imperialism”: supporting grassroots Iranian movements without replicating imperialist dynamics that undermine authentic agency and indigenous democratic change.

Sandro Brito Rojas argues that, for Marx, ideology is a false consciousness that obscures the true nature of social relations, particularly the alienation caused by the division between mental and material labor. Rojas highlights that Marx’s critique of ideology is not just intellectual but calls for revolutionary action. Ideology is a consequence of social contradictions, not their root cause. To overcome ideological distortions, a material transformation of society is neces

John Lysaker explores the many forms and values of friendship. He explores friendship as a lived interaction and examines the various goods it provides, such as recognition, growth, and care. Rather than ranking friendships, Lysaker argues for their diversity, showing how even imperfect or partial bonds enrich our lives and help shape who we become. He concludes, "Friendships prove better when they multiply and differentiate and so check our limits and metabolise our varied p

Roddy Brett explores the haunting legacy of enforced disappearance as a tool of political violence, particularly in Latin America. He examines the psychological and societal impacts on the families of the disappeared, delving into their daily rituals of hope and despair. By analyzing the intersection of state terror, genocide, and the denial of bodies, he calls for a deeper understanding of the human dimensions of disappearance and a more critical engagement with this crime a

In this evocative essay, Terrell Carver explores the disturbing power of political violence, memory, and absence. He examines how violence typically communicates through visibility and how disappearance as a strategy upends that logic. Focusing on Argentina’s “disappeared” and the symbolic resonance of everyday memorials like the baldosas por la memoria, Carver asks: How can we know and relate to the violence we haven't seen? How do we remember what was meant to be erased?

Is it wrong to value humans above all else? In this provocative essay, Christopher Belshaw explores the limits of anthropocentrism, weighing our moral duties to other creatures and the natural world. He argues that while extreme human-centered thinking is flawed, our unique moral agency brings special responsibilities. We shouldn’t dominate nature, but nor should we deny our moral role as custodians. He presents a nuanced defense of human significance without giving into supe

Benjamin George Coles argues that artistic means should often be incorporated into punishments – and indeed that we would benefit generally from thinking of punishment in more aesthetic terms. He first identifies the various objectives that we standardly have with punishment and argues for the primacy of an educational one. He then describes a series of real-life educational punishments and closes with a discussion of why the notion of punishment art is such a strange one.