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Reader's Digest: September 23, 2023
From an especially excellent edition of the LRB, here is Frances Gooding on alleged orca activism, our anthropomorphic tendencies, and a surprising…
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Kieran Setiya
1
On Translation
Not long ago, I received an email with a curious request: could I translate a passage quoted in Life is Hard from syntactically skewed into unskewed…
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Kieran Setiya
1
Reader's Digest: September 9, 2023
Catching up on The New Yorker, I came across an essay by the always-fascinating Kathryn Schulz, about the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl…
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Kieran Setiya
7
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The Confessional Turn
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3
Work / Life
 • Kieran Setiya
9
The Philosophic Buddha
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4
The Desire to Write
 • Kieran Setiya
3
Depression
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Why Bother?
I spoke recently at a benefit conference for Ukraine, about the value of philosophy. I was invited to be more personal than I was: my talk was about the…
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Kieran Setiya
3
Reader's Digest: August 26, 2023
Before he was an iconic cultural critic, Walter Benjamin made radio broadcasts for stations in Frankfurt and Berlin. His first, March 23, 1927, was…
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Kieran Setiya
A Series of Unfortunate Remarks
A few years back, “Lemony Snicket” was asked to review the Modern Library’s Selected Tales of H. P. Lovecraft. The results were blasphemous. After a bad…
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Kieran Setiya
Reader's Digest: August 12, 2023
For a bracingly cynical take on Gerhard Richter, often tagged as the pre-eminent visual artist working today, I recommend this piece by Malcolm Bull in…
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Kieran Setiya
1
The Confessional Turn
Something is happening in philosophy, something unexpected, unpredictable, and uncontained. “Starting around 2010,” writes Crispin Sartwell in the LA…
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Kieran Setiya
3
And He Can Lift It, Too
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt died this week. He was unexpectedly famous for a bestselling book, On Bullshit, that originated as a playful academic…
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Kieran Setiya
8
Reader's Digest: July 15, 2023
In haste, while traveling: two beautiful essays on beauty in art. Troy Jollimore, “Such Silence,” Plume: Keats, posterity, poetry, catastrophe, and…
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Kieran Setiya
Indexical
“Begin at the beginning,” the King of Hearts said to Alice, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Bad advice for constructing an index, since…
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Kieran Setiya
Reader's Digest: July 1, 2023
“Katabasis” is the Greek word for a descent into the underworld. Think Juno, Ceres, Orpheus, et al. “Anabasis” is its antonym: coming up out of the…
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Kieran Setiya
Under the Net
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Philosophy as a Guide to Life

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