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Articles by Carmen Lea Dege
Myth, Modernity, and the Legacy of the Axial Age: Taylor, Habermas, Assmann, and Jaspers
[Skip to Content] Purchase/rental options available: Buy Article for $16.00 (USD) ISSN 1086-3222 Print ISSN 0022-5037 Pages pp. 743-773 Launched on MUSE 2023-10-18 Open Access No This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.
History of European Ideas
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Donald Trump, Our Prophet of Deceit
The Frankfurt School on the appeal of authoritarianism—and how to counteract it. A number of recent books have put the methods of the social sciences in the service of understanding Trump, his movement, and his enablers, from Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s A Lot of People Are Saying (2019) to Jennifer Mercieca’s Demagogue for President (2020). But it may be equally constructive to examine the older works of social science and theory upon which these new studies, at least implicitly, rest.
The Obligation of Self-Discovery
Image: Flickr Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration. Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir Judith G. Coffin Cornell University Press, $32.95 (cloth) Why did I write all of this to you? Because I have never felt such a human closeness as I do with you, Madame, whose writing can express the whole gamut of emotions.
Lessons against self-love from the forgotten François Fénelon
Reputations are strange things. Sometimes they closely track merit and significance. Other times they don’t. An example of the latter is François Fénelon, a thinker and political figure whose name today is almost entirely unknown. He was many things: a philosopher, a political reformer, a priest, a towering figure in late 17th-century French life. For many years, he was best known as the author of the novel Telemachus (1699), which he wrote for a grandchild of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
When mental illness bears down, respite centres can uplift
As a person with the mental illness disability of schizoaffective disorder, I am quite familiar with the inpatient mental hospital experience. I have frequently devolved into crisis and found myself in the Emergency Room. This always leads to inpatient hospital stays, where I spend weeks living on isolation units. Hospital life is incredibly restrictive. I can never leave the facility, nor can I keep a cellphone or laptop with a Wi-Fi connection (only one hospital I stayed at permitted this).
What We Owe to Each Other
London student protests fee hikes, November 10, 2010 / Tamara Craiu (cc) In the second part of our interview with David Graeber he explains how student loan debt is perverting the value of education, and why academics are a lot like hunchbacked dwarves. David Graeber: The book really traces back to earlier activism, when I was involved in the global justice movement. I guess the global justice movement never ended; it just sputtered along for a while and then came back as Occupy Wall Street.
2020's Existentialist Turn
Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague,Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, to Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt–inspired musings about the state of emergency and what Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and Blaise Pascal can teach us about facing death.
2020's Existentialist Turn
Clockwise from top left: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger. While existentialist thinking has much wisdom to offer about anxiety, contingency, and death, we must also think concretely about politics and institutions.
2020's Existentialist Turn - Boston Review
Existentialist ideas have seen a remarkable comeback during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Albert Camus’s frequently invoked novel The Plague, Friedrich Nietzsche’s turn to tragedy, and Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of bad faith, to Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt–inspired musings about the state of emergency and what Michel de Montaigne, Martin Heidegger, and Blaise Pascal can teach us about facing death.
Bound by Disenchantment
In 1927, Martin Heidegger wrote Karl Jaspers, his then still “comrade-in-arms,” a gloomy letter about his last hour with his mother before she died. He expressed agony over a decision that features prominently in Martin Hägglund’s thought-provoking and ambitiously sweeping book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom: Should we be committed to eternal or finite life?
Finding Your Way Home
Sep 14, 2015 21 Min read time Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor's Retrieving Realism. Photo: John Kannenberg Retrieving Realism Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor In a hut in southern Germany and an apartment in New York City, about ninety years ago, two philosophers tried to sort out a family of ancient problems concerning experience, knowledge, and our place in the world. Working independently, they developed a similar idea and used it as a launching pad for more.
To Be and to Do
Jan 26, 2016 17 Min read time Philosopher Giorgio Agamben grapples with a humanity that has no work it must do. Photograph: Alexander Lyubavin L’uso dei corpi. Homo sacer, IV, 2 Giorgio Agamben Neri Pozza, €18 (paper) In June of 1968, twenty-six-year-old Giorgio Agamben left Paris, scene of spectacular unrest, for the first of two unusual seminars he would attend that year.
Against Empathy
Sep 10, 2014 22 Min read time Most people see the benefits of empathy as too obvious to require justification. Photograph: Samantha Stock When asked what I am working on, I often say I am writing a book about empathy. People tend to smile and nod, and then I add, “I’m against it.” This usually gets an uncomfortable laugh.
What We Owe to Each Other
David Graeber speaks at Maagdenhuis Amsterdam. Image: Wikimedia We talk with David Graeber about why we don’t put babies’ lives ahead of Citibank’s shareholders, and whether we should renew the tradition of debt jubilees. To read part 2 of the interview, click here. David Johnson: What inspired you to write the book? David Graeber: It came out of the strange moral power that debt has over people.
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