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Alfred North Whitehead and the Edinburgh Connection

By Leemon B. McHenry. 15 February is the birthday of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, born in 1841 – he would have been 155 today. Whitehead delivered his masterpiece of metaphysics, Process and Reality, at the Gifford Lectures…

Nancy in Love

‘It is possible that one day I will no longer love you, and this possibility cannot be taken away from love – it belongs to it. It is against this possibility, but also with it, that the promise is made, the word given.’ – Jean-Luc Nancy

David Hume and Scottish Philosophy

By Gordon Graham Not so very long ago, it was quite widely accepted that Britain’s most significant contribution to the development of philosophy was ‘empiricism’ and that its great exponents were the Englishman John Locke, the Irishman George Berkeley, and…

The semantic dimension of Newtonian Power

By Asher Jiang The concept of physical power in its modern forms has been introduced by Sir Isaac Newton in his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Although Newton has embedded this concept into a precise mathematical framework, the power…

Varun Uberoi - author photo

Multiculturalism Isn’t a Dirty Word

David Cameron has been avoiding the m-word. In his recent speech about extremism, the word ‘multicultural’ was noticeable by its omission for two reasons. First, Cameron said that Britain was a ‘successful multiracial and multi-faith democracy’ and a term like…

Politics – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary

The problem of how philosophy is to approach the word politics is especially difficult, as it is itself a stake of political struggle and thus steeped in equivocity. The question of just who is and who is not considered political, and what objects are part or are not part of political consideration, is itself always intrinsic to politics. Philosophy thus encounters the word politics as inherently equivocal or, in Badiou’s terms, as a ‘split word’.