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…

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…

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,”…

Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t fully appreciate how many princesses inhabit the Disney cinematic universe. Of course, I was aware of the iconic female characters from the animated movies, from Snow White through Ariel and Jasmine right up to Moana, Merida, and Elsa. If pressed, I probably would have been able to tell you that each of these individual characters is a princess, and I was certainly aware of the Disney princess phenomenon—little girls dressing up like their favorite characters for Halloween or walking through the Magic Kingdom decked out in tulle and tiaras. What hadn’t entirely…

If you feel disillusioned with the political and social status quo, you are not alone. The list of global and more localized existential threats is daunting, including pandemics, inflation, political polarization, mass shootings, offensive warfare, and climate change. We seem unable to course-correct. Doing so would require collective action. But institutions such as nation states, and international entities such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, and International Monetary Fund, have not successfully dealt with recent urgent crises that have a huge impact on our lives. Any illusion that the free market would lead to private initiatives that benefit us…

Twitter tempts us with a delicious possibility: that we might find connection with total strangers. On Twitter, we can discover people who share our moral vision—or, at least, our weird tastes in memes. Sometimes it works, and Twitter gives us warm and intimate communities. But Twitter also hands us the perfect weapon to exploit that intimacy: the retweet. Most of us on Twitter spend our time in some small backwater. We chat with a regular gang, in a space of shared context. We use insider language; we throw around ironies without explanation. Sometimes, Twitter can just seem like a long…

I grew up in the 1990s in a tiny Northern Bavarian town, at the border between what was then West Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hilly landscape with its quiet woodlands and baroque church steeples continued seamlessly on both sides. But on the Czechoslovakian side, all the buildings and the infrastructure appeared old and dilapidated. When my family took its first car trips after the fall of the Iron Curtain, my father would navigate around the potholes of neglected streets while I would sit in the back seat and anxiously stare at the washed-out facades of farmhouses, which the front gardens…

Feminism is a movement, or a cluster of movements. It appears in different points in history, different cultural contexts, responding to very different circumstances. Feminism is not driven by theory. It is driven by a critical consciousness that begins to imagine that things could be different, better. Sex and gender do not need to structure our lives as they do here and now; they do not need to be the enduring, rigid framework for our choices. Feminism does not tell us what to believe or what to fight for. It teaches us a mode of asking questions, a way of…