All that Hegel allows

Reivew of Robert Pippin, Filmed Thought
Robert Pippin, Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 312pp., £79.00 hb., £28.00 pb., 978 022667 1 956 hb., 978 022667 2 007 pb. The course of the relationship between philosophy and film studies never did run smooth. The encounter of these two disciplines, while producing both influential and exciting […]

Gimmickification

Reivew of Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 416pp., £28.95 hb., 978 0 67498 454 7 ‘[I]f only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy’. In this oft-cited remark, made […]

Stanley Cavell, 1926-2018

Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, who developed over the course of five decades an impressive oeuvre characterised by two main quests that define the singularity of his […]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience

Euphemism, the university and disobedience Alexander garcía düttmann Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered […]

72 Reviews

REVIEWS Paradise postponed David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, 1993. xiii + 387 pp., £40.00 hb., 0 521 41851 8. Despite a dismal economic performance since its resurgence in the late 1970s, it is currently fashionable to be for capitalism. Throughout the […]

60 Reviews

Kate Soper, Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism Peter Osborne, ed., Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism Dave Archard Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Vols. I and II Kate Soper Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction Richard Rorty Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of […]

166 Reviews

This thirteen-chapter volume claims to be the first book-length analysis, from a philosophical point of view, of the trend towards the commodification of higher education, combining philosophical analysis with empirical accounts of the current realities facing universities and academics. No longer do philosophers have the luxury of pretending that there might still be time to […]