John Gray | The New York Review of Books

Is Philosophy an Art?

In Witcraft, Jonathan Rée presents the history of English-language philosophy as a collection of artworks to be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities. But what did philosophers think they were doing?

Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English

by Jonathan Rée

March 25, 2021 issue

Getting Better All the Time?

The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory

by Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell

December 19, 2019 issue

‘The Kings’ Cake, Cut at the Congress of Vienna,’ 1815; from Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower, in which he argues that ‘the “cake of kings” could only be cut up with the help of the Rothschilds’ financial network’

Circling the Square

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

by Niall Ferguson

March 22, 2018 issue

Blowing Bubbles

Bubbles: Spheres, Volume 1: Microspherology

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

Globes: Spheres, Volume 2: Macrospherology

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

Foams: Spheres, Volume 3: Plural Spherology

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Mario Wenning

Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Thomas Dunlap, with a foreword by Creston Davis

Critique of Cynical Reason

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Michael Eldred, with a foreword by Andreas Huyssen

Stress and Freedom

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

In the Shadow of Mount Sinai: A Footnote on the Origins and Changing Forms of Total Membership

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban

Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner

The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Karen Margolis, edited and with an afterword by Peter Weibel

Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993–2012

by Peter Sloterdijk, translated from the German by Karen Margolis

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October 12, 2017 issue

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002

They Won’t Rest in Peace

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

by Thomas W. Laqueur

Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide

by Marzio Barbagli, translated from the Italian by Lucinda Byatt

June 23, 2016 issue

Peter Singer at Farm Sanctuary, a shelter for rescued farm animals, Watkins Glen, New York, 2006

How & How Not to Be Good

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

by Peter Singer

May 21, 2015 issue

Letter

Peter Singer

What’s Left Hanging?

June 25, 2015 issue

Children demonstrating in favor of a referendum backing the Good Friday peace agreement, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1998

The Dangers of Democracy

The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present

by David Runciman

March 20, 2014 issue

Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, a left-wing journalist and her father’s secretary, in 1869. ‘The cross she is wearing,’ Jonathan Sperber writes, ‘was not a sign of religious affiliation but the symbol of the Polish uprising of 1863.’

The Real Karl Marx

Jonathan Sperber’s ‘Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life’

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

by Jonathan Sperber

May 9, 2013 issue

Slavoj Žižek at his apartment in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010

The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek

A thinker whose formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility

Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

by Slavoj Žižek

Living in the End Times

by Slavoj Žižek

July 12, 2012 issue

Ray Kurzweil, surrounded by some of the foods he recommends for living a longer life, November 2004

On the Road to Immortality

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

November 24, 2011 issue

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference,
February 1945

Communists and Nazis: Just as Evil?

April 8, 2010 issue

The Way of All Debt

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

by Margaret Atwood

April 9, 2009 issue

A Rescue of Religion

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers

by Leszek Kolakowski, translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Kolakowska

October 9, 2008 issue

Are We Born Moral?

Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

by Marc D. Hauser

Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved

by Frans de Waal, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober

May 10, 2007 issue

The Moving Target

The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror

by George Soros

October 5, 2006 issue

The Case for Decency

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought

by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss

Unfinished Dialogue

by Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, with a foreword by Henry Hardy

Russia, Poland and Marxism: Isaiah Berlin to Andrzej Walicki, 1962–1996

July 13, 2006 issue

Letter

Gerald J. Oppenheimer

Sheffer Was American

November 2, 2006 issue

The Global Delusion

Globalization and Its Enemies

by Daniel Cohen, translated by Jessica B. Baker

How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make It in Today's Global Economy

by Suzanne Berger and the MIT Industrial Performance Center

End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation

by Barry C. Lynn

April 27, 2006 issue

The Mirage of Empire

Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

by Robert D. Kaplan

The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century

by Michael Mandelbaum

January 12, 2006 issue

Letter

Robert D. Kaplan

In the ‘Crucible of War’

February 23, 2006 issue

The World Is Round

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

by Thomas L. Friedman

August 11, 2005 issue