Tag: Philosophy
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Philosophy of Right: Reconstitution
Preface One hears, even from those who appear most intent on taking philosophy seriously, the familiar refrain that form is something external, indifferent to the matter itself, and that everything depends only on the “thing” or “content.” One further hears the vocation of the writer—especially the philosophical writer—defined as the discovery of truths, the stating…
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The Discipline of Civilization: Sloterdijk on Domestication, Spheres, Europe, and Philosophical Distance
In the provided interview-documentary philosophy is treated less as a storehouse of doctrines than as a contested social function: a practice that owes an account of its utility, its authority, and its freedom under modern conditions. Within a carefully edited alternation of interviewer prompts, narrated contextualization, and Sloterdijk’s own self-characterizations, the film constructs a description…
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Procedural Sovereignty and the Grammar of European Agency: Meloni and Merz in Rome between Competitiveness, Security, and Institutional Seriousness
The Rome joint press conference featuring Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz, staged as the public terminus of bilateral government consultations, offers a compact but unusually legible specimen of contemporary European executive reasoning: it is an event in which competitiveness, security, and sovereignty are treated less as separate policy domains than as mutually conditioning registers of…
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Freud’s Journey as an Outsider: Exploring Identity and Antisemitism in Vienna’s Complex Culture
The ARTE documentary Outsider. Freud. presents Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) through a deliberately biographical and experiential lens, treating his theoretical production less as an abstract “system” and more as a sequence of intellectual responses to lived ruptures. It frames Freud’s work as developing under persistent conditions of exposure—social, familial, bodily, and political—and argues that these conditions…
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Infrastructure as Intelligence: Huang and Fink on AI’s Platform Shift, the Energy–Compute Stack, and the Political Economy of Broad Participation
Convened at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the conversation stages a highly legible problem-space: how a set of technical claims about artificial intelligence, computational architecture, and industrial capacity can be translated into a public account of economic development that remains intelligible to non-specialists while still functioning as a justification for an immense redirection of…
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AI as a Truth-Procedure: Davos, Alex Karp, and the Exposure of Institutional Reality
The recorded exchange at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos, framed as a “conversation” between Laurence D. Fink and Alex Karp, stages artificial intelligence as a problem of institutional judgment rather than a mere problem of computational capability. Across a compact sequence of prompts and answers, the event concentrates on how sovereign…
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After Apollo, Before Babel: Progress at the Edge of Imitation and Apocalypse
The conversation unfolds as an extended attempt to diagnose what both speakers treat as a historically specific change in the character, tempo, and moral psychology of “progress,” especially in the West. Jordan Peterson frames Peter Thiel as an unusually philosophically oriented investor and entrepreneur, and presents the discussion less as a business interview than as…
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Peter Thiel on René Girard: Mimetic Desire, Contrarian Strategy, and the Management of Rivalry
In this conversation, Peter Thiel describes how he first encountered René Girard’s work and how, over time, Girard’s account of imitation became a durable interpretive framework for Thiel’s thinking about human behavior, institutional dynamics, and business leadership. Thiel situates the encounter in the late 1980s, when he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Stanford. He…
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The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Zero to One can be read as a sustained attempt to isolate what “newness” means when it is treated as an object of practical reason rather than as a decorative label for novelty. Its governing problem-space concerns how a finite agent, acting under uncertainty and inside institutions oriented toward repetition, can nonetheless form determinate commitments…
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
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From Zero to One: Peter Thiel on Monopoly, Differentiation, and the Politics of Innovation
At an event hosted at USC Annenberg and livestreamed to additional viewers on campus, Peter Thiel was introduced as an entrepreneur, investor, and author whose career had moved from PayPal’s early ambition to rethink money and payments to the creation and funding of technology companies across Silicon Valley. The moderator emphasized Thiel’s role in PayPal’s…
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From Zero to One, and Then to Nowhere Else: Thiel’s Case for Uneven Technological Progress
At Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government convened a public conversation in which historian Niall Ferguson moderated a wide-ranging discussion with technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. The exchange unfolded as a structured interview followed by audience questions, moving across the near-term condition of Silicon…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
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“Operational AI” and National Power: Alex Karp’s Case for American Technological Primacy
At the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025, Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp held a wide-ranging conversation with moderator Sean Connolly, the president and CEO of Conagra Brands, moving between autobiography, corporate culture, the operational use of artificial intelligence, and what Karp framed as the strategic requirements of American power in…
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
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Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data
J. Hayden Elsen’s Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data puts forward a claim about contemporary power: the decisive institutional transformation of the present is realized through software platforms that convert heterogeneous data into actionable, governable, and contractible forms of knowledge. The book’s contribution lies…
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Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
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Peter Thiel on Classical Liberalism
At a bicentenary event of the Oxford Union—an institution that frames its mission around debate, scrutiny of entrenched assumptions, and protection of free expression—Peter Thiel delivered an address that positioned the contemporary university, and “classical liberalism” more broadly, as systems under sustained stress. Thiel, a U.S. technology entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding PayPal and…
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Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Cosmopolitan Right at the Borderline: Strict Hospitality, Material Interdependence, and the Juridical Conditions of Peace
Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise scholarly stake: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once:…
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The Outside Within: Kant’s Unjust Enemy as an Institution of Peace Through Exclusion
Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a…
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War as Self-Conscious Negativity: Contradiction, Mediation, and the Practical Work of Drawing Limits
Yuval Kremnitzer’s lecture intervenes in a familiar moral certainty—war’s futility—by converting that certainty into a determinate philosophical problem: the mismatch between war’s overwhelming gravity and the thinness of the concepts and speech-forms through which modern publics try to grasp it. Its distinctive contribution lies in treating this mismatch as more than a rhetorical discomfort. The…
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Ewiger Friede on the Earth’s Surface: Aesthetic Testimony, Historical Complicity, and the Inherent Negativity of Peace in Kant
Anna Enström’s lecture proposes a reorientation of the contemporary reading of Kant’s peace theory by binding Zum ewigen Frieden to an aesthetic and material reflection on surfaces: the textual surface of the essay, the earthly surface that grounds Kant’s cosmopolitan right, and the historically sedimented surface of Europe’s war architecture as it reappears in Elle-Mie…
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Perpetual Peace as Rational Capacity: Nature, Antagonism, and the Exercise of Reason in Kant’s Political Philosophy
The lecture Kant on Perpetual Peace as Capacity proposes that Kant’s idea of perpetual peace must be grasped neither as a naturally given condition of human coexistence nor as a merely regulative horizon that forever eludes realization, but as a rational capacity whose very being consists in its exercise under historically and politically concrete conditions.…
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Hostility, Personhood, and Commerce: Reconstructing Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right to Be Spared Hostile Treatment
The lecture advances a precise and demanding thesis: that Kant’s sparse formulation of cosmopolitan right in the third definitive article of Toward Perpetual Peace contains, once read through the lens of his practical philosophy, a normatively complex and structurally ambivalent right not to be treated with hostility. Corinna Mieth’s contribution lies in reconstructing this right…
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Evil’s Actuality and the Modal Ground of Hope: Kantian Hylomorphism, Anthropological Standpoints, and the Structure of the Good
The lecture delivers an ambitious thesis: that the actuality of evil—conceived as the rational subordination of the moral law to self-love—discloses, in actu, the very modal structure that also makes the good materially possible, and thus gives warrant to hope for its predominance. Its distinctive contribution lies in rethreading Kant’s three guiding questions through a…
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War in Kant’s Political Philosophy: Alexei N. Krouglov on the Limits of a Pacifist Reading
Alexei N. Krouglov’s lecture examines Kant’s understanding of war in order to clarify, and partly correct, the widespread image of Kant as a straightforward pacifist whose treatise Perpetual Peace anticipates the international order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Krouglov argues that this reception is one-sided: alongside the tradition that reads Kant as a prophetic…
Simon Gros 