“Love shook my heart, Like the wind on the mountain Troubling the oak trees.“ — Sappho In such few poetic words, the Greek poet Sappho beautifully captures the transformational potential of human love. Love as an encounter occurs unpredictably, and much like the wind, it shakes, disturbs, troubles, and disrupts…

Much of modern philosophy has relied on a hierarchal opposition between the forces of pleasure and pain. Pleasure is sought as an intrinsic good, while pain is avoided as an intrinsic bad. This value system is the foundation for ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to egoist hedonism, which conceptualize human…

In Aesthetic Theory (written between 1956 and 1959 and published posthumously in 1970), sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, wrote “Foreignness [Fremdheit] to the world is an element of art.” However, such a statement is no longer true when considering contemporary artistic…

Note: I wrote this short note on the subject of violence a few weeks ago. It is a more experimental conception of violence that incorporates elements from several different theories. Violence can be categorized as either a negative or positive phenomenon. Throughout history, we have witnessed the use of both…

Criticisms of modern monetary theory (MMT) often focus on the concern of inflation. However, most of these criticisms are misplaced, based on misunderstandings or economic fallacies that should be cleared up. …

Note: While reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, I encountered the concept of the soul. I have never paid much attention to it, but it recently intrigued me, causing me to re-read Descartes, Plato, Eagleton, and others. After a day or two of thinking, I decided to write this piece…

Note: This essay was written for my English class after reading Fahrenheit 451. It is a brief literary analysis from the philosophical perspective of French Marxist Louis Althusser that introduces his concepts of ISAs and RSAs. The twentieth century was marked by several totalitarian regimes and acts of repression across…

Note: I was reading Berardi’s recent publication Futurability and found it very interesting. His articulation of our present impotence and investigation into different layers of possibility is crucial for social change. In this writing I hope to summarize the valuable insights Berardi offers at the beginning of his book. In…

Note: This is another paper I recently wrote for my AP Seminar class. It concerns the concept of the commons and how capitalist economic systems impact them. In this paper, I reach the conclusion that capitalism is contradictory to the sustainability of the commons due to its ‘growth fetish’, as…