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…

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,…

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…

Across the United States, school districts are being assailed for asking students to come to terms with history. The attacks have challenged the teaching of such novels as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) to high school literature students, and accounts of school desegregation such as Ruby Bridges Goes to School (2003) to elementary-school children. As efforts to purge school curricula of difficult history have grown in scope, the range of topics has expanded to include books on such subjects as the treatment of Native Americans, the experiences of lesbian and gay teenagers, and representations of the Holocaust. Such attempts to avoid…

Welcome to the first issue of The Raven, a magazine devoted to reviving the tradition of philosophical literature that deserves to be called literature. The Raven will publish original philosophy that is welcoming to readers with or without academic training in philosophy. Although “public philosophy” as currently practiced benefits the profession of philosophy—and, one hopes, the public as well—it rarely involves practicing the discipline of philosophy in public. It tends to address issues that are already of interest to a non-academic audience, in a manner already familiar to it. We believe that philosophy worth claiming public attention can do more.…

A frequently misunderstood argument in Mill’s On Liberty explains why academic freedom is essential in higher education.

How should we act when pervasive wrongdoing creates moral confusion? Before he was executed by the Nazi regime, German pastor and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer left an answer hidden in the rafters of his home.