Scholia Journal
Close readings, concept walkthroughs, and reader's maps for dense philosophy — Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and more.
critical theory
The textbook version of the culture industry (Kulturindustrie) argument runs something like this: Adorno and Horkheimer thought pop music was bad, Hollywood was manipulative, and mass audiences were…
phenomenology
The word epoché (ἐποχή) is usually translated "suspension" or "bracketing" — and both translations are accurate enough to be dangerous. They suggest that Husserl wanted you to set the world aside, to…
heidegger
Dasein — the word every English-speaking reader of Heidegger encounters on page one of Being and Time — is almost always translated as "human being" or "man." Both translations are wrong in a way tha…
hard books
In the winter of 1942, Maurice Merleau-Ponty submitted his principal thesis to the University of Paris. The war was still on. He was thirty-four, teaching at a lycée in Lyon, and the manuscript he ha…
ai reading tools
If you've asked ChatGPT to explain a passage from Heidegger's Being and Time and received a confident four-sentence summary that somehow missed the entire point of Dasein (Dasein) — the word that mea…
reading method
Hubert Dreyfus used to tell his Berkeley students that the trouble with reading a difficult book is not that you lack intelligence — it's that you keep trying to understand each sentence before you u…
ancient classical
"Allegory of the cave" — the phrase has become a bumper sticker. Prisoners watch shadows, one escapes into sunlight, and the moral is supposed to be: appearances deceive, reality is elsewhere. That r…
thesis mechanics
"You have one paragraph. That is not a problem. That is a thesis." Stanley Cavell said this — or something very near it — to a room of graduate students at Harvard, reportedly during a seminar on Wit…