Sam Dresser
Senior Editor, Aeon+Psyche
Sam has been with Aeon since its launch in 2012. He’s most interested in how to do philosophy and in the continental/analytic divide. History and politics are also amusing to him. He considers Evelyn Waugh to be a very funny writer and enjoys pubs more than he should.
Written by Sam Dresser
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Thinkers and theories
Peak ellipsis
Does philosophy reside in the unsayable or should it care only for precision? Carnap, Heidegger and the great divergence
Sam Dresser
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Anthropology
The meaning of Margaret Mead
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it?
Sam Dresser
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Thinkers and theories
Freud versus Jung: a bitter feud over the meaning of sex
Sam Dresser
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History of ideas
How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
Sam Dresser
Edited by Sam Dresser
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Nations and empires
Chastising little brother
Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius?
Shaun O’Dwyer
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Stories and literature
Her blazing world
Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?
Francesca Peacock
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Stories and literature
Do liberal arts liberate?
In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life
Nick Romeo
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History of ideas
Reimagining balance
In the Middle Ages, a new sense of balance fundamentally altered our understanding of nature and society
Joel Kaye
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Knowledge
What is ‘lived experience’?
The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity
Patrick J Casey
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Human rights and justice
My elusive pain
The lives of North Africans in France are shaped by a harrowing struggle to belong, marked by postcolonial trauma
Farah Abdessamad
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Religion
Conscientious unbelievers
How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment
Felicity Loughlin
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War and peace
Legacy of the Scythians
How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine
Peter Mumford
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Language and linguistics
Cathedrals of convention
Humans have a strong impulse to see things that are arbitrary or conventional as natural and essential – especially language
Reuben Cohn-Gordon
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Comparative philosophy
Folklore is philosophy
Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world
Abigail Tulenko
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Political philosophy
Liberal socialism now
As the crisis of democracy deepens, we must return to liberalism’s revolutionary and egalitarian roots
Matthew McManus
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Thinkers and theories
On knowing who he was
Alan Watts, for all his faults, was a wildly imaginative and provocative thinker who reimagined religion in a secular age
Christopher Harding