Allies (Fall 2019) | Boston Review

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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

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Philosophy & Religion

Class & Inequality, Philosophy & Religion

Bad Romance

Capitalism hasn’t disenchanted the world, a new book argues. Like a bad lover, it beguiles us into spiritual desolation—and only the most utopian politics will break its spell.

James G. Chappel

Philosophy & Religion

Can Christian Democracy Save Us?

The political philosophy embraced by Germany’s leading party helped reunite Europe after World War II. Can it guide us safely away from today’s populism—or did it cause it?

Udi Greenberg

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

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

Philosophy & Religion

The Gospel of Oil

Oil’s grip on U.S. society is as much religious as economic, a new history shows.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Philosophy & Religion, Reading Lists

A Century of Critical Theory

Happy birthday, Habermas!

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Philosophy & Religion

The Pacifist Roots of an American Nazi

Ingrid Rimland was a pioneering voice of the neo-Nazi Internet. She was also raised Mennonite, a peaceful religion with a long history of celebrating white “ethnic” identity.

Ben Goossen

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

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

Philosophy & Religion

Democracy Without God

In a new book, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that only atheists are truly committed to improving our world. But people of faith and socialists have more in common than he thinks.

James G. Chappel

Philosophy & Religion, Politics

The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump

Does Trump’s success vindicate or undermine liberal theory?

Samuel Scheffler

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