Nation Topics - Philosophy | The Nation

Charles Taylor is a sadly endangered type: the philosopher-statesman.

The Social Animal is a deep and public embarrassment, a lumpy hybrid of fable, neuroscience and social engineering.

Since the ’70s, liberals and leftists have misidentified the source of conservatism’s appeal.

With Examined Lives, James Miller offers a serious and readable study of the relationship between philosophy and life conduct.

With a sharp eye for cultural patterns and a keen feel for the shape of a story, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a poet in the laboratory of anthropology.

For William James, all our certitudes depend on the pretense that there are no radical mysteries underlying them.

The enigma of George Price: He derived an equation for the evolution of altruism, yet he died believing himself a failed good Samaritan.

The axis of moral struggle, a stroke of salvation--these are the spiritual dimensions of Tolstoy's late fiction.

In their discussions of justice, Michael Sandel and Amartya Sen endorse communal good but slight collective endeavor.

Is the task of philosophy "to learn how to die," or to teach that there is no such thing as a good death?