Two Stanford Humanities Center Fellows for 2023–24, Marroquín and Zuo, discuss the concept of hope.

Presumably, it has never been a good time for the humanities. Perhaps because it is simply in the nature of these disciplines to find themselves perpetually in crisis, lagging behind the times, dragging their leaden feet made out of indelible words, asking for more and more time in a civilization perpetually in a rush. They are constantly on the edge of a precipice, but we cannot deny that, while they awkwardly balance on the edge, they do enjoy magnificent views. After all, our fields do not thrive on security, on solid facts, on controlled experiments with measurable outcomes.

Nineteenth-century concepts of kinaesthesia influenced the evolution of Edmund Husserl's work, truly transforming the discipline of philosophy and setting an agenda for poststructuralism. In this piece, Noland argues that a sense category central to dance impacted what we now call "critical theory," as though the dancing body ghosted a discourse that has typically ignored it.

How interesting John Milton's use of the word "certain" is.

When playing chess, what do you mean when you say "check"? Per Wittgenstein, perhaps we communicate in ways that have surprisingly little to do with what we actually say. 

McLaughlin examines the relationship between poetry and philosophy in light of Immanuel Kant's theory of force.

Joseph Vogl discusses Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the semiotics of speculative finance markets in the introduction to his brilliant interdisciplinary book.

Popularly known as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes won that title ostensibly by rejecting traditional modes of intellectual inquiry largely associated with commentary on prior texts, and replacing them with the first attempt at a kind of radical phenomenology.

So Twitter can hide some tweets, and does, and will continue to do so, now with a toothpick precision to tailor its approach according to the law of the land (or landline) where the 140 character chirp has been posted. And everyone is up in arms and ready to boycott the addictive site for… a day.

Most of what passes for cool ontology these days—when people dare to do it at all—is just a form of atomism. How do I mean? An atom is something that can't be cut any further. We think of them as little shiny pingpong balls like the ones we saw in high school chemistry.