On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled "In Search of the Miraculous". The damaged boat was...

Soren Kierkegaard's radical protestant philosophy of the individual – in which a person's leap of faith is favored over general ethics – has become a model for many contemporary political theorists. Thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have...

What is the opposite of freedom? In "Freedom as Marronage", Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Cruci...

Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato's famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato's challenge was resolved long...

"Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks" publish selected papers drawn from the various advanced-level activities at the University of Chicago Center in Paris. In Volume Seven, scholars from across the continent consider Europe as a discourse made of t...

The Metropolitan Museum Journal, issued annually by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, publishes original research on works in the Museum's collections and the areas of investigation they represent. The essays in this volume include a new analysis of Gr...

Violent and property crime rates in all Western countries have been falling since the early and mid-1990s, after rising in the 1970s and 1980s. Few people have noticed the common patterns and fewer have attempted to understand or explain them. Yet th...

The nineteenth century was, for many societies, a period of coming to grips with the growing, and seemingly unstoppable, domination of the world by the "Great Powers" of Europe. The Ottoman Empire was no exception: Ottomans from all walks of life – e...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. Reconstructing the journey to this meeting with deft narrative talent, Frantisek Smahel tra...

The Iron Curtain did not exist – at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historica...