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…

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…

Stoic advice on the coronavirus crisis

By Christopher Gill Many of the themes regularly used for life-guidance based on Stoic philosophy can help with responding to the current coronavirus crisis; here are a few suggestions. Drawing a clear distinction between what we can and cannot control,…

Søren Kierkegaard

The Radical Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

Explore the ideas behind writing the newly published book The Radical Philosophy of Søren Kierkegard by Saitya Brata Das. It is difficult to read Kierkegaard, not to speak of writing about him.  The difficulty of reading Kierkegaard and writing about…

Free EUP content this month: September 2019

Read on to find out about the latest research content you can access and read for free this month, from journal articles, to free sample chapters and open access books spanning across a range of our core subject areas. Film,…

Clausewitz and Civil–Military Relations

Many readers of On War have taken Clausewitz’s discussion of the ‘logic’ of war tending to ‘extremes’ and concluded that he believed that, if a state were going to wage war, the only sensible way to do it would be…

Utopia: A round-table discussion

Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…

Photograph of Jean-Luc Nancy

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…