Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In "African Art as Philosophy", Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor's infl...

From Shakespeare to Beckett, the contradictory figure of the fool who possesses unexpected wisdom has been a popular and effective literary trope and rhetorical figure for centuries. Philosophy needs idiots too, argues Keson Sutherland in "Stupefacti...

French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes was one of the leading influences on the post-structuralist movement in twentieth-century literary thought, and some of his best-known works, like S-Z, speak directly to the essential and indivi...

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre's "Typhus" centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nig...

In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for ar...

Tzvetan Todorov is one of Europe's leading intellectuals. Beyond his work in cultural and literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Todorov's influence is extraordinarily far-reaching specifically because of the clarity of his writing and his r...