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Image by Hans Glaser depicting a blood rain that supposedly occurred near Dinkelsbühl in Germany’s Franconia region in 1554.

Strange Gods: Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned.
by Joshua Blu Buhs via The Public Domain Review on November 26, 2024
19th-century painting: "Talking it Over"

How Prairie Philosophy Democratised Thought in 19th-century America

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest.
by Joseph M. Keegin via Aeon on September 10, 2024
A house and people from the American frontier.

The Wild Blood Dynasty

What a little-known family reveals about the nation’s untamed spirit.
by Adam Begley via The Atlantic on May 14, 2024
Bruce Lee in a classic pose from the movie ‘Enter the Dragon.'

The Fighting Spirit of Bruce Lee

The actor and martial arts star also wanted to be regarded as a poet-philosopher.
by Jeff Chang via The Wall Street Journal on August 12, 2023
The sixty-four hexagrams from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

The I Ching in America

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
by Livia Gershon, Richard J. Smith via JSTOR Daily on May 4, 2023

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.
by David A. Bell via New York Review of Books on June 5, 2025
Book cover for The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram features a phone cord snaking around text.
partner

Irrelevant at Best, or Else Complicit

The state of design in 1970.
by Maggie Gram via HNN on June 3, 2025
Portrait of Henry George

“The Great Enigma of Our Times”

The 1881, Henry George’s ”Progress and Poverty” proposed a land value tax — helping to usher in the Progressive Era.
by Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on May 21, 2025
Scene of prehistoric game hunters.

Prehistory’s Original Sin

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.
by Connor Grubaugh via The Hedgehog Review on May 6, 2025
Detail of landscape painting Villa Menaggio, Lago di Como by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

Transcending the Glass Ceiling

Five women who made important contributions to 19th-century American philosophy finally get their due.
by Lydia Moland via The American Scholar on March 27, 2025
Black and white photograph of a lake.

Not So Close

For Henry David Thoreau, it is only as strangers that we can see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are.
by Ashley C. Barnes via Commonweal on March 18, 2025

The Sum of Our Wisdom

We are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good.
by Marilynne Robinson via The Hedgehog Review on March 18, 2025
John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard.

American Marxism Got Lost on Campus

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.
by Russell Jacoby via Jacobin on December 8, 2024
John Locke

Review of "America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life"

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.
by Raymond Haberski Jr. via American Literary History on November 15, 2024
Senator J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Toward a Christian Postliberal Left

A truly Christian postliberalism would imagine and enact an alternative modernity with a different standard of progress.
by Eugene McCarraher via Commonweal on October 22, 2024
Ibn Khaldun

The Muslim Thinker Who Inspired Reagan

How Ibn Khaldun influenced the president and a generation of conservative tax policy.
by Mustafa Akyol via The Dispatch on October 10, 2024

The Surprising Origins and Politics of Equality

Should equality, instead of another political ideal, should be at the center of our politics?
by Samuel Moyn via The Nation on August 27, 2024
A painting of Napoleon Bonaparte standing in the center of the National Assembly.

Liberalism and Equality

Liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace.
by Gregory Conti via American Affairs on August 20, 2024
A drawing of a bust of Abraham Lincoln sitting on philosophy books.

From Königsberg to Gettysburg

How German Enlightenment thought influenced Abraham Lincoln.
by Allen C. Guelzo via Claremont Review of Books on June 15, 2024
Charles Fort.

In Praise of the Paranormal Curiosity of Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.
by Ed Simon via Literary Hub on June 10, 2024
A magnifying glass sitting on top of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn.

What Was the “Paradigm Shift”?

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.
by Audra J. Wolfe via The New Republic on May 22, 2024
Black and white image of Abraham Lincoln, with the edges of his face out of focus.

No Slaves, No Masters: What Democracy Meant to Abraham Lincoln

A detailed look on Abraham Lincoln's political philosophy on slavery, ownership, and freedom.
by Allen C. Guelzo via Literary Hub on February 8, 2024
Hannah Ardent

Anatomist of Evil

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book hurls us deeper into Hannah Arendt’s thinking, showing us that there was muddle rather than method at the heart of it.
by Stuart Jeffries via Literary Review on February 1, 2024
A group of birds with one standing on top of the rest.

Rules for the Ruling Class

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy.
by Evan Osnos via The New Yorker on January 22, 2024
Books "Three Roads Back" and "Henry David Thoreau."

To Walden

Two new books attempt to grasp Thoreau’s seeming contradictions without reconciling them too easily.
by Todd Shy via Los Angeles Review of Books on November 7, 2023
Illustration of Chalude Shannon, William Weaver, and Italo Calvino, placed on a background of binary code

Language Machinery: Who Will Attend to the Machine's Writing?

The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
by Richard Hughes Gibson via The Hedgehog Review on November 7, 2023
Painting Romania Unchained.

Where Identity Politics Actually Comes From

Nationalism, not postmodernism, is the fount of today's politics of recognition.
by Jason Blakely via The Chronicle of Higher Education on October 3, 2023
Walden Pond Revisited painting depicting a man standing among nature.

Making a Living Is More Than Work

Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life.
by Jonathan Malesic via The Hedgehog Review on August 1, 2023
Hayden White from the cover of "The Ethics of Narrative."

The Ironic Radical: On Hayden White’s “The Ethics of Narrative”

The kinds of narratives historians tend to fall back on constrain our ability to imagine alternatives to the way things have been, and to the way things are.
by Michael S. Roth via Los Angeles Review of Books on June 2, 2023
Illustration of a happy Founder with flowers as eyes.

Happiness In America Isn’t What It Used to Be

"We have lost sight of some essential aspects of happiness that the founders clearly had in mind."
by Darrin M. McMahon via TIME on January 10, 2023
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