• Photograph showing a page from a medieval manuscript.

Phenomenology of regular spirit

The phrase "phenomenology of regular spirit” rolled off the tongue easily, quickly, and thoughtlessly. How else would one distinguish between two books with such similar titles? Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, that text that needs no introduction and our text, Phenomenology of Black Spirit. But in the invisible regularity of calling Hegel’s text “regular,” we were reminded of how irregular Blackness and Black people are and have been.
A statue of Plato in front of an Athens government building

Plato on how to describe the changing world

by Takeshi Nakamura From time to time throughout his dialogues, Plato complains how difficult it is to capture the transient natural world with inert language (e.g., the Theaetetus and the Cratylus). After all, the world in flux changes as you…

Q&A with Patrick O’Connor

Q. Tell us a bit about your book A. Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is really a book about the importance of philosophy for literature. In it, I look at how one writer uses philosophy to…

A flying fox landing on water

Shimmer: The Kiss of Life Includes Us, Too

An extract from Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril by Deborah Bird Rose Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose’s remarkable final book is a landmark piece of interdisciplinary, multi-species scholarship based on fieldwork with the zoologists, conservationists and Aboriginal…