The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
...more
Posts Tagged: philosophy
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #17: Oppression, Ownership, Turkeys, and Roses
Politics has become a bloated balloon on the horizon of our days, marked with the face of the Pr*sident, grinning under his orange corona like a demented sun-god, a raucous Ra. It burns.
...moreWeekly Geekery
He loves me, he loves me not: science fiction’s relationship with L. Ron Hubbard. Babies will stop the bullies! The key to reckoning with climate change and nuclear bombs? Stories.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with André Alexis
André Alexis discusses his latest book The Hidden Keys, puzzles, chance, divinity, and the Toronto literary community.
...moreSuperman Is a Bad Translation
For Slate, Shon Arieh-Lerer and Daniel Hubbard provide a video rundown of pop culture’s use of Nietzsche, starting with contemporaneous forces made his philosophy be mangled by Nazi power and ending with True Detective and Kanye.
...moreInto Paradox
Over at the New York Review of Books, Peter E. Gordon writes about Søren Kierkegaard’s legacy through the lens of Daphne Hampson’s biography, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, which she dedicates to S.K. for helping her grasp “with greater clarity why I should not wish to be Christian.”
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jonathon Keats
Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats discusses Buckminster Fuller, three-wheeled cars, domed cities, climate change, and cameras with a 100-year exposure time.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo passed away on August 23, 2016. Earlier this summer, he spoke with Sarah Blake about his debut collection Four Reincarnations, writing with and about cancer, and how language is a game.
...moreThe Forbidden Maths
Gabrielle Emanuel writes for NPR’s Education section on the history of math education. Emanuel explores how basic mathematics were kept from becoming the common knowledge they are today, due to the influence of centuries-old taboos around money and commerce.
...moreCaptain of My Soul
For the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv profiles philosopher Martha Nussbaum: Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.
...moreThe Hope Whose Death It Announces
Poetry is defined by a failure to live up to the hype it generates, promising divine transcendence through a medium that is essentially human. This is the paradox Ben Lerner articulates in his dissertation on The Hatred of Poetry. At The New Republic, Ken Chen doesn’t buy it: You get the sense Lerner’s intellectualized peevishness […]
...moreSummer of Love
Charlotte Shane, best known for her newsletter portraying her life as a sex worker and philosopher, Prostitute Laundry, now has a column at Fusion. Her collected writings are also available in her newest release, N.B.
...moreTennis as Art Form
Understanding tennis as aesthetic phenomenon involves returning to that word Wallace insists on using in his discussion of Federer: beauty. At Guernica, Greg Chase discusses the new collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, String Theory, in which tennis is investigated as an art form in light of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy on words like “beauty” […]
...moreMind Over Genre
Over at Lit Hub, Jennifer R. Bernstein confronts the disciplinary rift that has grown between psychology and literature to show how the two are linked, even nested inside one another in our studies of self and pain: For these authors were writing literature of a kind; you could hear it in the music of their […]
...moreSuch Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
This past weekend, thousands of people convened to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Elizabethan bard’s formal innovations are widely revered as some of the most influential literary developments in history, so much so that we almost overlook what he was even writing about: …for Shakespeare, life itself is a type of lie.
...moreAnd So I Present Myself
The urge to claim a space for the self collides and colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. Sallie Tisdale shares a beautiful essay from her newly released collected essays, Violation, in which she meditates in frenzy and anxiety over the question of the self: whether or not one can […]
...more
Deep Conditioning with Wilson Phillips
“Don’t become a professor,” he said. “I’d rather you become a garbage man. They get paid more and have better benefits.”
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jessa Crispin
Jessa Crispin talks about The Dead Ladies Project and The Creative Tarot, founding Bookslut, why she has an antagonistic relationship with the publishing industry, and her estrangement from modern feminism.
...moreThe Internet as Place
It seems counterintuitive that technology could facilitate these kinds of humanistic affirmations. That the voices of the oppressed could find not just a home, but an incredibly powerful platform, online. Yet, here we are reaching out, speaking out, and asserting our humanity in ways that could imperil our very lives, offline. Rob Henderson writes for […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Understanding our origins. The New York Public library is encouraging people to make video games. Thoreau’s world of death. Can drugs help us understand life?
...more
Nietzsche the Space Man
It is often said that who controls the past controls the future but Nietzsche is one of the first to anticipate the power of speculation—that he who controls the future, controls the present.
...more
Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas
Do novels think?
...moreTalking Philosophy With Philip K. Dick
Melville House has just published a collection of interviews of the late Philip K. Dick. Head over to their website to read an excerpt from the last interview the author ever gave, to Gregg Rickman, shortly before his death.
...more
Scarf as Signifier
In honor of the upcoming centennial birthday of French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, Hermés is releasing a limited-edition scarf designed in his honor. The New Yorker will gladly demystify that commodity for you.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: An Enemy to No Man but Himself
Jennifer Steil reflects on the death and life of her ex and comes to an unexpected understanding of addiction and the limits of responsibility.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Diagramming the viral sentence. Technology just ruined fun and your childhood. Bury me with my iPhone. Selfies for president. Black Twitter matters.
...moreSeeing is (Not) Believing
Does perception provide us with an accurate picture of reality? To what extent is our environment a reflection of our psychological state? UCLA Philosophy Professor Josh Armstrong examines all sorts of thought-provoking questions in his critique of John Searle’s Seeing Things As They Are in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
...moreDerrida Goes to Princeton
New Jersey is about to get Poststructural, thanks to Princeton’s recent acquisition of Jacques Derrida’s library. The collection contains nearly 14,000 books, many of which bear marginalia from the celebrated critic and philosopher. The collection will be available to scholars at Princeton’s Firestone Library.
...more