• Profile half-length photograph of a man facing to the left wearing a dark jacket and tie, holding a cigarette in his hand, with a white handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. The man has a prominent straight nose, slicked back hair and his tie forms a slight arch from the knot. In the background, on the left side of the image, there is another half-length frontal portrait of a man. He has white hair, also wears a jacket and tie, is looking to the right, and is smiling.
Photograph of the Breton coast, showing sky with sunlight through clouds on a grey sea with distant mountains on the horizon

Kenneth White on the Breton Coast (The Fundamental Field)

William Sharp evokes ‘those wild Breton coasts of the Tréguier headland’ with the ‘grey, muttering waste’ of the sea. Little did I realise, when I must have read these phrases at the age of 14 on a cliff overlooking the north end of the village of Fairlie, in Ayrshire, Scotland that years later I would be living in that self-same area.

Remembering Sarah Kofman in the 2020s?

By Jacob Bates-Firth Sarah Kofman and the Relief of Philosophy (ed. Bates-Firth and McKeane) is out now as a special issue of Paragraph, 44:1 (March 2021) and concurrently in book form with Edinburgh University Press. Backdrop When John and I began to…

Photograph of the US Capitol at night

Spinoza and democracy in peril

By Dan Taylor In October 2020, in the days leading up to the US Presidential Election, over 130 leading historians of fascism signed an open letter. They warned that democracy today is deeply imperilled. It is either ‘withering or in…

The world of Spinoza's Theological–Political Treatise

The world of Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise

By Dan Taylor Baruch Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, quickly turned Europe upside-down. Dismissed by one contemporary as a book ‘forged in hell by the Devil himself’, it argued that for societies to endure conflict and flourish, they…

Buddhism and Cinematic Technicity-Consciousness

By Victor Fan ‘Cinematic Imaging and Imagining through the Lens of Buddhism’ (from the latest issue of Paragraph) is one of my ‘test drives’ for a longer and more substantial project that seeks to reconfigure film and media philosophy by…

Aristotle and the Open Future

By Jason W. Carter How much do we know about the future? Some people think that we can know a lot about the future – even the distant future. We might now know, for instance, that a catastrophe caused by…

About William S. Burroughs

By Stanley Gontarski American outlier writer, William S. Burroughs, was a creative force, as a writer in his own right, and as a cultural theorist, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call “a society of control” or “a…

The myth of the selfless philosopher

By Enrico Galvagni There is a myth that spans the history of western thought: the myth of the selfless philosopher. True philosophers, the myth says, are ethereal creatures who dropped every trace of pride, egoism, and vainglory to devote their…