In the modern Western World, our model of democracy is highly valued and defended. This system of government famously owes a great debt to the Ancient Greek city of Athens. Yet ancient Athens was originally only one among a thousand autonomous city states, each with their own form of government. …
Read More
As we walk through the pillar vault of the democratic world, the capitals still shine, representing the achievements of the long political process of democratisation. However, achievements in a more turbulent world are under threat.…
Read More
It is not much of a challenge for us in the West to perceive the rise of modern liberal democracy as the predestined fate for our nations, similar to the view of the steady establishment of the present-day nation-state. This deterministic attitude deletes not merely all other possible options, but…
Read Moreby Lapo Lappin Recently I was sucked into a WhatsApp group chat called ”The Italians” – a safe haven for Erasmus students far from the peninsula. The thumbnail for this group was a ”Hawaii pizza”, the chunks of pineapple clearly visible in the foreground. As soon as the group was…
Read MoreBy Charley Iszatt Users on Instagram – through producing images and coding them with hashtags – create a commons of social, cultural and political information. In the context of veganism, these practices have the potential to conceal its ethical foundations by becoming less politically charged and more personally motivated. The…
Read More
By Egil Sturk In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) Jorge Luis Borges imagines a secret 17th-century society of scholars called Orbis Tertius, akin to the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, dedicated to the creation of a new country: Uqbar. This secret society consists of idealist rationalists like George Berkeley,…
Read More
By Amanda Winberg Since the popularization of the concept in Sir Thomas More’s famous essay Utopia from 1516, the idea of a utopian society has come to signify a paradox in political thinking. Whilst the word “utopia” indicates a situation in which the preferred political ideals are finalized, it must…
Read More
Av Linus Wahlberg & Simon Norin Finns det rätt och fel? Finns det bra och dåliga beslut? Är vissa samhällen bättre än andra? För att påstå att det kan finnas ett sant idealsamhälle, en utopi som alla delar, verkar det som att dessa frågor måste besvaras, för vilket man måste…
Read More
By Per Risberg The word “utopia” is made out of two greek words: ού, meaning nothing, and τόπος, meaning place. So basically a utopia is a nothing place, or nowhere place. The creator of the word is Sir Thomas More, who invented it for his novel conveniently named Utopia. In…
Read More
By Lapo Lappin It is a common cliché, first quipped by Alfred North Whitehead, that Western philosophy is a series of ”footnotes to Plato”. This is, of course, entirely true. But it is perhaps not as precise as could be desired. Not only is Western philosophy footnotes to Plato –…
Read More