Philosophy & Law

Barbed wire and a US flag at Guantanamo Bay

Detained in Guantánamo

Thom Dyke

3 April 2025

When I told people I was going to Guantánamo Bay last September to observe the trial of the 9/11 hijackers, I was met with bemusement. Even the lawyers I spoke to seemed surprised that there were still detainees at Guantánamo, and even more surprised to hear there was a trial going on there. But to describe these judicial proceedings as a ‘trial’ is to fall into the obfuscation that typifies life at Guantánamo Bay.

Read more about Short Cuts: Detained in Guantánamo

Massacre in Damascus

Youssef Ben Ismail

6 March 2025

In the summer​ of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. Druze militias sacked Maronite Christian villages, killing eleven thousand people. Muslim mobs killed more . . .

Executive Hyperactivity

Aziz Huq

6 March 2025

Russell Vought​, architect of Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page compendium of extreme conservative policies – and now head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, explained . . .

Chastity or Fornication?

Lucy Wooding

6 March 2025

Few​ things expose the potential for illogicality, hypocrisy and cruelty within the Christian tradition more clearly than its attitude to sex. Throughout the centuries, the struggle to comprehend divine . . .

Saints for Supper

Alexander Bevilacqua

26 December 2024

Some time​ in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where . . .

Bantu in the Bathroom

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2015

Pistorius was surely not aware that when he insisted the person he shot in the bathroom was an intruder he was re-enacting one strand of his nation’s cruellest past.

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The Adulteress Wife: Beauvoir Misrepresented

Toril Moi, 11 February 2010

In June 1946 Simone de Beauvoir was 38. She had just finished The Ethics of Ambiguity, and was wondering what to write next. Urged by Jean Genet, she went to see the Lady and the Unicorn...

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Where is my mind?

Jerry Fodor, 12 February 2009

If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you. They...

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Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: Richard Dawkins

Terry Eagleton, 19 October 2006

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology....

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No, it’s not anti-semitic: the right to criticise Israel

Judith Butler, 21 August 2003

Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in...

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You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife: Hardt and Negri’s Empire

Malcolm Bull, 4 October 2001

Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the...

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Why anything? Why this?

Derek Parfit, 22 January 1998

It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists.

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Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 4 December 1986

It was nice to be awoken on 12 November by the BBC informing us that the Queen’s Speech would announce measures ‘to strengthen the jury system’. It is, after all, a very ancient...

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The Contingency of Language

Richard Rorty, 17 April 1986

About two hundred years ago, the idea that A truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social...

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Sleeping Women: On the Pelicot trial

Sophie Smith, 26 December 2024

Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations from the norm, but as products of what she has called a ‘macho and patriarchal...

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Love’s Work is the ‘existential drama’ of a postwar Jewish British woman philosopher, born in London in 1947, who reads books, sits in meetings, falls in love, falls ill, faces death. But it also...

Read more about What else actually is there? On Gillian Rose

At some point Americans are going to have to confront a painful truth: they can no longer rely on the constitutional machinery devised by the nation’s late 18th-century founders. Muddling through this...

Read more about Commencing Demagogues and Ending Tyrants: What’s wrong with the electoral college

Diary: Why I Resigned

Francis FitzGibbon, 24 October 2024

The plan to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers to Rwanda was the last straw. In May 2023, I resigned as a (part-time) immigration judge after twenty years in the job. It was less a matter of conscience, more...

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William James was acutely sensitive to both his own disabling pain and the wriggling ironies of his super-subtle family, who complicated any ideas he might profess about healthful and happy lives. In the...

Read more about No Dose for It at the Chemist: William James’s Prescriptions

Can an eyeball have lovers? Emerson’s Scepticism

Michael Ledger-Lomas, 26 September 2024

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

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On Reichenau Island

Irina Dumitrescu, 26 September 2024

In its first three centuries Reichenau Abbey was one of the leading educational centres in Europe. Its abbots produced fine manuscripts for their own use and on commission. They were involved in Carolingian...

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Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...

Read more about Knife at the Throat: Fanon’s Contradictions

Diary: At the 6 January trials

Linda Kinstler, 26 September 2024

At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...

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Good Vibrations: On the Rule of Law

Frederick Wilmot-Smith, 12 September 2024

Mediation is not a solution that seeks to resolve cases justly according to law; it tries to get parties to negotiate a compromise. As Hazel Genn put it, the outcome of mediation ‘is not about just settlement,...

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Trivialised to Death: Reading Genesis

James Butler, 15 August 2024

Genesis, which narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days...

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I suppose I must have: On Gaslighting

Sophie Lewis, 1 August 2024

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

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Many books include passages which, despite their authors’ best efforts, simply do not make sense. Wittgenstein may be involved in a mirror image of this: that is, the Tractatus may include many passages...

Read more about A Tove on the Table: Versions of Wittgenstein

There is something of the handyman about Daniel Dennett’s approach to philosophy proper – a confidence that we can make progress on philosophical questions by getting a grip on the details, and an...

Read more about Tillosophy: What about consciousness?

Wild Resistance: Adorno's Aesthetics

Owen Hatherley, 6 June 2024

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...

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The Troubles Legacy Act has been unilaterally imposed by the UK. Almost everyone hates it. Northern Ireland’s largest political parties all oppose it, though not for entirely the same reasons.

Read more about Slow Waltz: Trouble with the Troubles Act

Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...

Read more about A Little of This Honey: What was the ghetto?

Trickes of the Clergye: Atheistical Thoughts

Alexandra Walsham, 25 April 2024

In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the...

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