Allies (Fall 2019) | Boston Review

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Philosophy

Philosophy & Religion, Science & Nature

What Makes Science Trustworthy

The “scientific method” of high school textbooks does not exist. But there are scientific methods, and they play an essential role in making scientific knowledge reliable.

Philip Kitcher

Gender & Sexuality, Law & Justice

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action. 

Gina Schouten

Philosophy & Religion

The Critical Bite of Cultural Relativism

The pioneers of cultural anthropology taught not just how to study other cultures, but how to criticize their own.

Gili Kliger

War & Security

How Do We End the Never-Ending Wars?

Wars may begin like they always have, but they no longer end as they once did. We need an ethics of war termination to hold politicians accountable.

Elad Uzan

Philosophy & Religion

The Future of Political Philosophy

For five decades Anglophone political philosophy has been dominated by the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls. With liberalism in crisis, have these ideas outlived their time?

Katrina Forrester

Science & Nature

The Why of the World

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

Tim Maudlin

Reading Lists

The World’s Top 50 Thinkers

Twenty percent of them are Boston Review contributors! 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Philosophy & Religion, Reading Lists

A Century of Critical Theory

Happy birthday, Habermas!

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Arts in Society, Philosophy & Religion

A Hidden Order of Reality

Far from being consigned to the ash heap of intellectual fashions, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, a new biography shows, is in many ways still with us.

Gili Kliger

Philosophy & Religion, Politics

The Book on Marx That Arendt Never Finished

Hannah Arendt’s unfinished book on Marx offers a timely philosophical dialogue for our era of economic precarity.

Geoffrey Wildanger

Arts in Society, Reading Lists

Writing the Twentieth Century

Poets, philosophers, playwrights. 

Rosie Gillies

Philosophy & Religion

The Myths of Enlightenment

For the philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, myths and metaphors were pivotal to philosophical thinking, not opposed to it.

Marta Figlerowicz

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