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…

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…

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.…

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…

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

Much philosophy starts with an innocent-sounding question. To some, the question will sound innocent to the point of stupidity; those people get off the bus right away. Some stick around a bit longer and find that the apparent stupidity opens up into profound intellectual vistas; enticed, they stay for the ride. Some of these long-distance passengers never cease to be excited by the view. Others come to feel that they have been taken for a ride and that the fantastic views are mirages.  As I read Ludwig Wittgenstein, he is among the latter group of passengers. He once suggested we…

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.

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…