Category Archives: Essays

Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

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AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Book Reviews, Essays, Literature

Book Reviews: ‘Silent Catastrophes – Essays In Austrian Literature’

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LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 21, 2025): Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his flame. Her latest tribute to Sebald is a translation in a single volume of his two collections of essays on Austrian literature, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (‘The Description of Misfortune’) and Unheimliche Heimat (‘Strange Homeland’). Written mostly in the 1980s, these essays preceded the semi-fictional works, culminating in Austerlitz (2001), that made Sebald internationally known. They represent something rare in German but common in English: literary criticism, occupying the space between academic study and journalistic discussion. And they say more, and say it more searchingly, profoundly and pithily, than a cartload of academic monographs.

Sebald rapidly became alienated from the old-fashioned Germanistik he encountered at the University of Freiburg in the early 1960s. The professors, he felt, had culpably failed to reflect on the relations between literature and the recent German past. He found intellectual and ethical stimulus in the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and the idiosyncratic, always marginal genius Walter Benjamin. References to Benjamin and a range of psychologists and sociologists pepper these texts, reinforcing Sebald’s own insights.

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Essays, Humanities, Mathematics, Science

Mathematics Essay: ‘Beyond Causality’

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AEON (February 14, 2025): In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’.

Mind and world are no separate spheres that must first be connected. Rather, both depend on each other

Snow substantiated his diagnosis with anecdotes of respected literary intellectuals who complained about the illiteracy of the scientists but who themselves had never heard of such a fundamental statement as the second law of thermodynamics. And he told of brilliant scientific minds who might know a lot about the second law but were barely up to the task of reading Charles Dickens, let alone an ‘esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer … like Rainer Maria Rilke.’

Mathematics mediates a conciliatory view that avoids the mistake of the naive realist and the naive idealist…

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘I want to show the colourfulness of mathematics.’ In that spirit, I placed mathematics at the centre of my project because, in my view, mathematics searches along more of these many paths than any other intellectual discipline. It is connected on a deep level both with the natural sciences and the humanities. It bridges the gulf between them, and it does so by putting certain metaphysical and epistemological dogmas into question, as will become clear in the following.

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Gordon Gillespie is an actuary, quantitative risk manager and data scientist. He has a doctorate in philosophy and is the author of the German-language book The Oracle of Numbers: A Short Philosophy of Mathematics (2023). He lives in Rüdesheim, Germany.

Essays, History, Law

History & Law: ‘Beyond Logic And Freedom – The Dred Scott Decision’

The Imaginative Conservative (February 13, 2025): With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as the presidential election of 1860 approached.

I. The Historical Background

On March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan took the oath of office as president of the United States, the Supreme court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F.A. San[d]ford.[i]The case was complex and the decision long in coming. In 1834, an army surgeon named John Emerson reported for duty at Rock Island, Illinois.With him was Dred Scott, a slave whom he had recently purchased in St. Louis. Emerson kept Scott with him at Fort Armstrong for two years, despite an Illinois state law forbidding slavery. In 1836, the army posted Dr. Emerson to Fort Snelling, located in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, in what was then Wisconsin territory and which subsequently became the state of Minnesota. As before, he took his slave Dred Scott with him, although the Missouri Compromise explicitly prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’. While stationed at Fort Snelling, Emerson bought a slave woman named Harriet, who eventually married Dred Scott, although the law did not sanction slave marriages. After several years, the army again transferred Emerson, whose slaves returned with him to Missouri.[ii]

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III. Consequences & Significance

Not since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 had the Supreme Court employed the principle of judicial review to overturn congressional legislation. The court’s ruling that neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ban slavery, in effect, renounced both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty. Taney had made it clear to Republicans that even should they win control of the national government they could not execute their pledge to keep the territories free of slavery. Slavery could only be proscribed after a territory became a state. By then it might be too well entrenched to remove. It appeared both to the opponents of slavery and to the advocates of free soil that Taney and a majority of the Supreme Court were parties to a vast conspiracy among slaveholders to take over the government.

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Arts & Literature, Essays

Essays: ‘Wollstonecraft – A Daring Experiment’


TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (February 13, 2025): After her husband drowned off the coast of Tuscany, Mary Shelley relayed an unusual request to her stepmother in London. Would she send a “remembrance” of her mother, the revolutionary-era philosopher of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died shortly after Shelley’s birth? In response, Mary Shelley’s father put aside one of her mother’s rings, crafted from pearls and a lock of hair taken from Wollstonecraft’s closest female friend, Fanny Blood: a gothic symbol of eternal love. 

Like the bejewelled ring with Fanny’s hair, Wollstonecraft and her first love lived on – thanks to the retelling of their life stories by other philosophers and writers. As a kind of female Socrates, Wollstonecraft sketched the contours of a new form of philosophy, undertaken not necessarily by writing, but also and more fundamentally by living and experimenting. An author of autobiographical novels and epistolary memoirs, Wollstonecraft used personal narratives to ground her defence of the rights of the poor, women, children, African slaves and Native Americans as integral to the “rights of humanity”. Later thinkers, especially in the feminist tradition, have attempted to flesh out this story of human emancipation left incomplete by her untimely death at the age of thirty-eight.

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Essays, Humanities

The Humanities: ‘We Are Mythmaking Creatures’

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOG (February 9, 2025): Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.

The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.

Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.

Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:

1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.

Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.

2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.

Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.

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Owen Ware is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Return of the Gods (OUP, 2025), Fichte’s Moral Philosophy (OUP, 2020), Kant’s Justification of Ethics (OUP, 2021), Kant on Freedom (CUP, 2023), Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany (Routledge, 2024), and the co-editor of Fichte’s System of Ethics: A Critical Guide (CUP, 2021).

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essay: ‘The Post-Neoliberal Delusion’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 10, 2025): Although there are many explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, voters’ views of the U.S. economy may have been decisive. In polling shortly before the election, more than 60 percent of voters in swing states agreed with the idea that the economy was on the wrong track, and even higher numbers registered concern about the cost of living. In exit polls, 75 percent of voters agreed that inflation was a “hardship.”

These views may seem surprising given various economic indicators at the time of the election. After all, unemployment was low, inflation had come down, GDP growth was strong, and wages were rising faster than prices. But these figures largely missed the lasting effects that dramatic price increases had on many Americans, which made it harder for them to pay for groceries, pay off credit cards, and buy homes. Not entirely unreasonably, they blamed that squarely on the Biden administration.

Biden arrived in office in 2021 with what he understood as an economic mandate to “Build Back Better.” The United States had not yet fully reopened after nearly a year of restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had suppressed activity in the service sector. Biden set out to restructure the country’s post-pandemic economy based on a muscular new approach to governing. Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.”

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JASON FURMAN is Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University. He was Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

Addictions, Behavior, Essays, Opinion

Opinion Essay: ‘The Price We Pay Betting On Sports’

THE NEW YORK TIMES (February 9, 2025); By Carl Erik Fisher

When we think about any addiction, we tend to focus on people who are utterly consumed by it — those whose lives are visibly falling apart. Yet gambling challenges our usual assumptions about addiction and risk, as its harms extend far beyond the most severe cases.

Consider a young man from my therapy practice, a former college athlete, who isn’t bankrupt or in crisis but feels stuck in a cycle of unhealthy online sports betting. He repeatedly deletes the betting app from his phone, only to reinstall it days later at the prompting of a well-timed email, a group bet with friends or simply the ads plastered across every sports arena. He does fine at work and mostly keeps to the dollar limits he sets, but his internal preoccupation, restlessness and chasing of losses just feel bad. He wouldn’t call himself addicted, but he doesn’t feel healthy, either. At the very least, he has the creeping sense that he’d feel better if he put his attention and energy toward something more meaningful.

Serious gambling addiction is devastating. Beyond financial ruin, it increases the risk of physical health problems, domestic violence and family rupture. Every year, 2.5 million American adults suffer from severe gambling problems. Many suffer invisibly, silently wagering away their lives on cellphones, perhaps in the very same room as their family and friends.

These severe cases demand attention, but focusing only on them obscures something important. As a physician and someone in recovery from alcohol and stimulant addiction myself, I’m concerned by how we have been conditioned to see addiction in all-or-nothing terms. Beyond the millions of Americans who meet the criteria for gambling disorder, five million to eight million more have a mild to moderate gambling problem that still affects their lives — like my patient. Since the federal ban on sports betting was struck down in 2018, sports gambling in the United States has exploded, with annual wagers now approaching $150 billion.

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Dr. Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist at Columbia University. He’s the author of “The Urge: Our History of Addiction.”

Culture, Essays, Opinion, Social Media

‘Americans Are Trapped In An Algorithmic Cage’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 7, 2025): Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace.

Arrogant as this declaration was, I now wonder whether it was merely premature. Although Bush won the 2004 election, reality came crashing down rather rapidly—Bush’s agenda failed in Congress, the American people came to view the war in Iraq as needless folly, Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, and the economy tumbled into the Great Recession in 2008, after which Democrats recaptured control of the White House.

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Education, Essays, Publishing

Essay: ‘This Is A Golden Age For University Presses’

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION (February 7, 2025): As part of my freelance work with Kent State University Press, I’m spending some of this winter drumming up awareness of Ghosts of an Old Forest, by Deborah Fleming, a retired professor of English at Ashland University. It’s a task made considerably easier by the success of Fleming’s previous book, also with Kent State. Resurrection of the Wild won the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, judged that year by Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman.

Those are marquee names, and my Kent State colleagues got to celebrate at a ceremony emceed by Seth Meyers — not the kind of thing most readers typically associate with university-press publishing. But Kent State is not alone in its success, even among its small cohort of university presses in Ohio. Last fall the tiny University of Akron Press had the winner of the National Book Award for poetry with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living. (That ceremony was overseen by Kate McKinnon.) Ohio State University Press had a National Book Award finalist in the highly competitive nonfiction category back in 2020 with How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, by Emerson College’s Jerald Walter. Just in one state, the list of nationally recognized books from university presses is impressive. Expand out and you get much more, including Percival Everett’s Erasure, the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction. It was originally published by the University Press of New England. Imagine the world without these books.

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