You might not think writing style matters in philosophy. But Kwame Anthony Appiah – a professor of philosophy who’s also a literary scholar – argues that style is crucial for understanding almost all the great philosophers. He shows how a single strange sentence from the American philosopher Quine unsettles our familiar sense of the world. In contrast, French philosopher Montaigne’s humble style underpins his open-minded thinking. Anthony guides us through the rewards of reading philosophy as a kind of literature.
Month: November 2017
A utopia presents an ideal world that has overcome the problems of the present. For the original Utopia, written by Thomas More in the 16th century, one of those problems was the division of land into public and private. His solution was shared ownership of the land. But what sounded good on the page didn’t work so smoothly in practice. German professor Bethany Wiggin shows us how utopian thinking shaped the founding of Philadelphia — and how it clashed with the values of the Lenape people already living there.