The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No god was more represented in ancient Rome than the phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrations...

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...

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption – just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees....

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 cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. Gathered here in "A Winter's Journey" are four remarkable conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Braus...

In "The Immaterial", French social philosopher Andre Gorz (1923-2007) argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consum...

According to political philosopher Frederic Gros, traditional notions of war and peace are currently being replaced by ideas of intervention and security. But while we may be able to speak of an end to war, this does not imply an end to violence. On...

Modern political theory begins with the rise of the philosophical concept and practice of sovereignty in the sixteenth century. Over the course of the next several centuries, sovereignty was generalized as the form of the modern state – eventually, t...

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...

Can humanity be divided into good and evil? And if so, is it possible for the good to vanquish the evil, eradicating it from the face of the Earth by declaring war on evildoers and bringing them to justice? Can we overcome evil by the power of memory...