We launched The Raven two years ago to revive a literary form of philosophical writing that, we felt, had fallen out of favor in academic publications due to the professionalization of the field. We believed that others held this style of philosophy in equally high regard and would gravitate to our publication as contributors and readers. Our high hopes were confirmed by our first two issues. But we also knew that our venture might face growing pains and unforeseen complications. It has taken more time than we anticipated to publish this, our third issue. In that time, we have juggled…

The pioneer of the modern memoir, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was a philosopher, and in the 250 years since his Confessions dropped, several other philosophers have followed his lead. Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Stanley Cavell all produced excellent memoirs. But beyond such special cases, philosophy and autobiography have always been a tricky fit. Literary personal narrative requires a set of inclinations and skills that are only rarely present in humans in general, and are also in tension with philosophy’s tendencies toward impersonality, abstraction, and technicality. The academic professionalization of philosophy in the 20th century didn’t…

Editors’ Note: This essay was written, edited, and prepared for publication before the October 7th attack on Israel. The decision to proceed with publication of it should not be interpreted as a response, by the author or the editors, to that event. About twenty years ago, I did some horrible things. I should not have done these things. I have not denied doing them nor did I resume my life as if I had never done them. I have, over the years, struggled with the question of how to acknowledge what I did, how to live in light of what…

Lockdown arrived in a fidget of activity. I spent the day before helping in my daughters’ school, hoping to feel of use. The teachers were busy photocopying worksheets, trying to figure out what would be required of them in the coming days and weeks. I talked philosophy with the children, class after class, in the large and draughty hall. We talked about aliens who wore sofas on their heads and whether sitting on your sister turned her into a chair. The space fizzed with laughter and chatter. The next day we all withdrew into our homes. Descartes’s Meditations on First…

Are you a real fan of your favorite sports team? A true fan? If you haven’t heard what it takes to be a real fan, well, then I have some exciting news: there are guidelines! Bill Simmons sets out twenty rules to being a true fan. If that sounds over the top, Paul Taylor at Bleacher Report offers you ten. Everyone seems to agree that suffering is involved. The real fan identifies with her team. Your team loses, you lose with them. A player does something embarrassing, and you are embarrassed with them. You put in time, money, and emotion,…

Identity politics gets a bad rap these days. Critics on the right portray it as grievance politics. Centrist critics worry that it serves to divide instead of to unify. Critics on the left claim that it misidentifies the real underlying cause of structural injustice: class-based oppression. Erstwhile comrades are pointing fingers across familiar battle lines. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture offers a defense of identity politics from the left. His thesis is that the problem lies not with identity politics, per se, but with the structural forces that shape it. The titular concept of “elite capture” describes “how political projects,”…

Practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors. In case you doubt that, here are some figures. Unmarried: Plato, Plotinus, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant. Married: Socrates, Aristotle, Hegel.

How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel §255 This remark, like many of Wittgenstein’s, seems to arise from self-examination. The answer he gives suggests that he is concerned with learning just by thinking, and indeed with the particular kind of learning just by thinking that happens in philosophy (as opposed to, say, mathematics). He seems to be asking how such learning is even possible. What are we to make of his answer? I remember being surprised when I was taught where to place the…

By now we are all acquainted with the pandemic’s pathology of feeling. We know about the loneliness, the hopelessness, and the grief. But there are other reactions, less prominent but not rare. In my case, the past two years have been accompanied by a curiously persistent case of nostalgia. I go on little quests of memory, in search of images tediously generic and blazingly specific. Fall leaves brushing against school bus windows, the otherworldly glow of high-school football games at night, the slow crawl of school closures across the TV screen on snowy mornings. Sometimes these reminiscences turn obsessive. I…