Essays

In a book tellingly entitled Without Offending Humans. A Critique of Animal Rights,[1]philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay thus summarizes her disdain for an argument aimed at extending equal moral and legal protection to other than human beings: What seems most serious is a [passage] that condemns article 3 of the Nuremberg code. Ethico-political insensitivity and a…

In the mid-1960s, as the Cold War seemed frozen into place after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the stalemate that defused the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the spirit of a “New Left” began to emerge in the West. Although encouraged by events in the Third World, its common denominator…

Students often reproached me for being theoretical. I never denied that. I always said then that you do not need to confuse the notion of praxis with that of practice. In my opinion, Marx connected theory and praxis in the real Aristotelian sense: for him theory was praxis. — A. Th. Van Leeuwen Kohei Saito’s…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had immediate and severe impacts on women in the sex trade who are already among the most vulnerable women on the planet. Because of quarantines, social distancing, governments’ neglect of the poor, systemic racism in all walks of life including healthcare, failure to protect children from abuse, and the predation of…

The Covid 19 crisis that is ravaging the world, killing thousands and infecting millions, subverting democracies and exacerbating autocracies through state of emergency, and uprooting, starving or pauperizing entire populations, has a geopolitical origin – Wuhan, China – a socio-anthropological origin – the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – and a biological origin – the mixture…

Nothing exemplifies the hallucinatory universe created by Rodrigo Duterte in the 7,400 islands of the Philippines better than Imee Marcos, daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, running for the Senate under the banner of the PDP-Laban party.  “God works in mysterious ways,” she said, an irony on the irony of being with the…

Since publishing Critical Theory of Technology (Feenberg 1991), I have gone on to develop a specifically political philosophy of technology which I now call “critical constructivism.” That approach is based on a number of intellectual traditions, including the Frankfurt School, Heideggerian phenomenology, Marxist labor process theory, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). This eclectic combination…

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. Yuval Noah Harari[1] I. Philosophical Controversies in the Antagonistic Area   Since the beginning of the first decade of this century, three among the leading philosophers of the leftist galaxy, Antonio (Toni) Negri,…