“Girl with a Book,” by Alexander Deineka  (1934) In “Caveat Lector: From Wittgenstein to The Philosophy of Reading,” Robert Hanna explores, against the grain of Analytic philosophy’s general avoidance of the fact or phenomenon of reading, and starting out with Wittgenstein’s compact sub-investigation in Philosophical Investigations into “the part the word [‘reading’] plays in our … [continue reading]

“Girl with a Book,” by Alexander Deineka  (1934) In “The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy,” Robert Hanna argues as follows: You, the reader of this very sentence, are consciously reading this very sentence from left to right here and now. Dear Reader, please now read the first sentence of this essay again, this time … [continue reading]

(Lewandowsky et al., 2012: p. 122) On the whole, philosophical correspondence and philosophical conversation alike are often interesting and productive, and sometimes profoundly significant. Indeed, sometimes philosophical correspondence and philosophical conversation are mind-changing or life-changing, and even—in accordance with Marx’s famous dictum that thus far philosophers have only ever interpreted the world in different ways, … [continue reading]

According to Robert Hanna in his essay “What Can Kantian Philosophy Do for Humanity? From Leonard Nelson to Phildialogues,” broadly Kantian philosophy—by which Hanna means philosophy inspired by Kant’s work, but neither dogmatically restricted to Kant’s own texts nor in any way committed to Kant’s own philosophical errors or personal prejudices—is profoundly relevant to the … [continue reading]

(Guardian, 2025) In his essay, “Why Mainstream Contemporary Professional Academic Philosophy Could Be Done By Chatbots,” Robert Hanna argues that if formal methods really are central to contemporary philosophy, then mainstream contemporary professional academic philosophy could be done by the most sophisticated chatbots—say, by ChatGPT-5, or whatever. In order to prove this, he reproduces an … [continue reading]

“The Death of Socrates By Means of The American Philosophical Association,” by Q (2013), after “The Death of Socrates,” by Jacques-Louis David (1787) In his essay, “Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy, And A Real and Relevant Alternative,” Robert Hanna argues that academics in general, and academic philosophers in particular, … [continue reading]

In “The New Conflict of the Faculties: Kant, Radical Enlightenment, The Hyper-State, and How to Philosophize During a Pandemic,” Robert Hanna applies a Kant-inspired interpretation of enlightenment as radical enlightenment to the enterprise of philosophy within the context of our contemporary world-situation, and try to answer this very hard question: “As radically enlightened Kantian philosophers … [continue reading]

In his essay, “Thinking Inside and Outside the Fly-Bottle: The New Poverty of Philosophy and Its Second Copernican Revolution,” Robert Hanna formulates and defend two metaphilosophical theses. The first thesis is what he calls The New Poverty of Philosophy, which says this: I. So-called “hard” problems in philosophy are actually institutional artifacts of Anglo-American professional academic … [continue reading]

One of the exceptionally attractive qualities of Nietzsche’s brilliantly original style of philosophical writing, for better or worse, is that it’s the Rorschach blot of philosophy: everyone who takes it seriously finds their own philosophical obsessions written there. And this is true, with a bang!, of the subtitle of Twilight of the Idols: “How To … [continue reading]

In every cry of every Man,In every Infants cry of fear,In every voice: in every ban,The mind-forg’d manacles I hear (Blake, 1794: lines 5-8) [P]hilosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of [humanity]. … [continue reading]