What do we really owe a stranger at the door, and what grounds that obligation? In this episode, Craig and Adam turn to Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality to unpack Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey, tracing how Xenia, the ancient Greek law of guest and host, becomes a lens for thinking through breaking Zeus's law, the massacre of the suitors, and the slow collapse of Bronze Age civilization. The conversation moves through Derrida's distinction between conditional and absolute hospitality, and what it means for a world where borders, asylum claims, and even hospitals have turned the promise of welcome into a catastrophe. It's Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic read through Derrida: gods, guests, and the violence lurking underneath the oldest tablets of law.

The Organic Intellectual (As Defined by Gramsci) is posting on Substack thoughts that come from his/her own experiences .But there are still other traditional intellectuals who also publish with Cambridge, sometimes also on Substack, and have an elite status.

In this context, the Substack intellectual - who usually is a freelance writer an MA or a PHD- and the Ivy League traditional intellectual both provide literature that can be as good as it was in the time of the ancient Greeks, this I could argue.

Yet, they are comepting with each other for paradigmatic ideas and shifts in intellectual perspectives in their fields. One is aiming at this with funded and institutionalised rhetoric. The other is less institutionalised, less funded, but gets less attention.

To what extent can a paradigm shift - like Original Concepts in philosophy - could emerge from institutionalised intellectuals comepting with unknown and non institutionalised thinkers ?

Can we see, for example, powerful movements like French Sociology or Anaylitical philosophy shaping up from Substack with this room of freeplay ?

Militarist Humanism does not argue that more weapons automatically create more peace.

It argues something more uncomfortable:

Human rights only survive if someone is capable of defending them.

A constitution can promise freedom.
A society can reject violence.
A culture can value compassion.

But if none of them can resist coercion, those principles ultimately depend on the goodwill of whoever possesses greater power.

That does not mean worshipping military force.

It means building strength across society , defense, science, technology, resilient institutions, critical thinking, economic capacity, cyber security and disciplined citizens — while placing that strength under law and human dignity.

The objective is neither weakness nor domination.

It is a society capable of saying:

We seek peace because we value humanity , not because we are incapable of resisting those who do not.

Where do you think the line lies between necessary strength and the beginning of militarism?

I'm a blue collar anarchist interested in better understanding how academia shapes the attitudes and communication habits of students. Over the course of my 2 decades of activism I've noticed degree-bearers in left-wing political spaces carry a lot of class chauvinism with them, privileging "soft skills" over other communication styles, and adopting conflict resolution strategies that sound like they're reading out of a human resources binder. It's been a lot of years since I've read critical pedagogy (mainly a slim volume called Making It Up As We Go Along by Chris Mercigliano) so my attempts at finding references has been just punching search terms into google, and I think we all know how useful that is these days. Thanks in advance.

Here's the english transcript for non-Spanish speakers:

>"Everything I have written, both in my novels and in my essays, concerns the crisis facing humanity today—a crisis in which I have been intimately involved because, as I said, I pursued science to its very limits.

>I completed my studies in Paris, returned to Argentina, taught, carried out research into atomic radiation, and taught Einstein’s theory of relativity in postgraduate courses. In this way, I reached the very frontiers of science, and it terrified me. I was in Paris when the uranium atom was split in 1938—a historic event that divided humanity in two, because it ultimately led to the atomic bomb. Philosophically speaking, that moment terrified me. It was then that I began to realise that physics was going to dominate the world and that technology was going to overwhelm humanity.

>This process had begun in the Renaissance with the rise of positive science. Positive science and technology enabled humankind to embark on a Promethean adventure: the conquest of the world and of things—the natural and external world. But this conquest came at a paradoxical and tragic price. Humanity conquered the world of things, but at great risk to its soul. It ultimately objectified itself; it transformed itself into a thing.

>In the most technically advanced societies, such as those of the United States and Russia, this is plain to see. Young Americans did not rise up merely to demand better wages. This proves that our crisis is fundamentally a spiritual one, rather than simply an economic one. They rose up against the technological and technocratic world, against the idolatry of technology. We must react against that.

>At that time, I began to think deeply about these questions, and I came to believe—and still believe—that, of all the activities of the human spirit, art is the only one that allows us not only to express the total crisis of modern humanity, but perhaps also provides one of the possibilities for our salvation.

>In art, humanity is fully present. The novel, for example, contains ideas—which belong to the rational world, like science and philosophy—but, at the other extreme, it contains symbols, myths, and passions. Humanity is that totality, that integrity. The novel, particularly, therefore allows both the expression of the crisis and one of the attempts at humanity’s salvation within that crisis.

>I believed this from the very beginning, but over the years I have only become more convinced of it. I believe it more and more. And now the world has already reached that point: the crisis is plain to see in the ecological disaster and in the destruction of humankind."

I’ve been developing a framework for thinking about moral harm that treats it like an ecological system: harm behaves like contamination, systems have carrying capacities, and repair is an active process rather than something that happens on its own over time. This is different from the weighing your good and bad deeds and seeing which is heavier. This is from a book I’ve been working on, I’d genuinely like to know whether this particular piece of it is already a recognized concept because I haven’t been able to place it precisely.

The core claim:
Think about a friendship. Two people who know each other well can absorb a significant amount of difficulty without the relationship failing… Below a certain threshold, the system cleans itself. The apology is offered and received. The offense fades… Now think about what happens above that threshold. A serious betrayal… does not always clean itself. The contamination has exceeded what the friendship can process. Something permanent has changed.

The same logic scales up — friendships, families, communities, nations, the international system — and at each scale, the “cleansing mechanism” looks different and is distributed unequally.

Access to repair is itself a function of power. The person with a lawyer, a network, a reputation to leverage — they have more access to the system’s cleansing capacity than the person with none of those things…

This is the flows-downhill argument, the more you have and smarter you are, the more harshly you should be measured, and the less you have and dumber you are, the more understandable your moral lapses are (doesn’t get you off the hook). So the people who are rich enough to muck up the system have lawyers to protect them but the vixtins who most need the cleansing system to work are the people with the least ability to activate it. Not everyone gets an Erin Brocavich.

Uncleaned harm can also ruin the systems ability to repair.

For example, a river that receives more pollutant than it can process does not simply fail to clean itself. The excess contamination kills the organisms that do the cleaning… The harm, in other words, is not just the current load. It is ruining the system’s future ability to handle load.

So, genuinely asking: does this overlap substantially with existing work I should know about? The places I’d guess it might already exist under another name — restorative justice literature, ecological/systems-theory ethics, trauma-informed care frameworks, truth-and-reconciliation scholarship, but I don’t know the literature well enough to know if I’ve reinvented something or actually found a gap. Curious what people who know these fields better think.

Thank you. Please note a previous version of this was mainly written using an LLM. It was properly removed from this subreddit. I have put in time and rewritten a large percentage of it in the hopes I am now compliant with the subreddits rules.

As a further note, some of the paragraphs are pulled directly from the framework I am working on and that was written with the support of an LLM. Using an AI is part of the thought experiment itself so I hope that doesn’t disqualify me either.

I swear this is my own idea…at least I think it is, that’s why I’m here…please help me…is this a novel way to view moral systems and if not, can you direct me to a source?

Thank you!

Why is it that the so-called "elite" and the ones with the money, wealth, and influence seem to be giving up on humanity? The tech elites argue that humanity's time is over and the next step of evolution is AI and that it is okay if it wiped us out. The majority of the rich and wealthy don't care about the wellbeingness of the planet and humanity in general. And almost all of the politicians look like they are trying to buy a ticket to some sort of apocalypse bunker or space shuttle, and as long as they get that, they are more than happy to set fire on the entire world. I mean everything now a days is dark: our movies, songs, games, jocks,nursary rhymes etc. The old saying is becoming more true now, if there is such a thing as more true :). Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. I am not being misogynist here, I am just quoting and I think the 'men'

should include women.

In short, why are we hating life? Why? Isn't this probably the best good time in our history?

I always thought Dialectic of Enlightenment, Racecraft, and Willing Slaves of Capital were super impressive. I don't read much anymore but used to devour Verso books.

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” addresses responding to crises. Snyder warns that authoritarian leaders exploit disasters to consolidate power, urging readers to remain vigilant and skeptical in alarming times. He reinforces the notion that while crises may seem insurmountable, history teaches us that surrendering freedoms in the name of security only empowers tyrants.

...the phenomenon of “post-truth”—the abandonment of facts as a precursor to tyranny. He starkly asserts that without an objective truth, power escapes scrutiny. His compelling argument urges citizens to demand accountability and seek knowledge over misinformation. By fostering a commitment to truth, Snyder believes society can counter populist tendencies that seek to distort reality.

As history has shown, the future is indeed shaped by those willing to confront the uncomfortable truths of their time.

Oppressed populations using nonviolent tactics—such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and other forms of disrupting societal order—are often the most powerful drivers of their own liberation.

Civil resistance strategies operate successfully in many different conflicts because tyrants depend on wide-scale obedience to remain in power. However, over time many citizens living under dictatorships refuse to remain apathetic forever.

If people do not obey, rulers cannot rule

These and other movements of civil resistance succeeded because they were based on a fundamental insight about power: that nearly all institutions, organizations, and systems in a society depend on the ongoing consent, cooperation, and obedience of large numbers of ordinary people. Therefore, if people choose to withdraw their consent and cooperation in an organized and strategic way, they can wield coercive power. When people do not obey, then presidents, mayors, CEOs, generals, and other “power holders” can no longer rule with unchecked power.

I've started reading Wolfe's 'What is Posthumanism'. I am finding it hard to understand because he uses a lot of references to different theoreticians and myriad different concepts? Any advice for a better approach to wolfe, any prior readings?

Also, I see him criticising Hayles as if she were a transhumanist, which I don't understand.

I’ve been developing a framework for thinking about moral harm that treats it less like a ledger (who did what to whom, tally the score) and more like an ecological system: harm behaves like contamination, systems have carrying capacities, and repair is an active process rather than something that happens on its own over time. This is from a book I’ve been working on, I’d genuinely like to know whether this particular piece of it is already a recognized approach under a different name, because I haven’t been able to place it precisely.

The core claim:
Think about a friendship. Two people who know each other well can absorb a significant amount of difficulty without the relationship failing… Below a certain threshold, the system cleans itself. The apology is offered and received. The offense fades… Now think about what happens above that threshold. A serious betrayal… does not always clean itself. The contamination has exceeded what the friendship can process. Something permanent has changed.

The same logic scales up — friendships, families, communities, nations, the international system — and at each scale, the “cleansing mechanism” (what actually repairs the harm) looks different and is distributed unequally:

Access to repair is itself a function of power. The person with a lawyer, a network, a reputation to leverage — they have more access to the system’s cleansing capacity than the person with none of those things… This is the flows-downhill gradient seen from the repair side: the people who most need the cleansing system to work are the people with the least ability to activate it.

The part I think might actually be the novel piece, if any of it is: carrying capacity isn’t fixed, and harm above it doesn’t just accumulate — it damages the mechanism that would have cleaned it up in the first place.

A river that receives more pollutant than it can process does not simply fail to clean itself and then wait for a correction. The excess contamination kills the organisms that do the cleaning… The harm, in other words, is not just the current load. It is the degradation of the system’s future ability to handle load.

And cleansing itself is treated as requiring three specific, active things — acknowledgment, accountability, and repair — with the claim that skipping any one of them means the harm doesn’t actually clear, it just gets absorbed into the system’s structure and shows up generations later as “normal-seeming inequality that nobody is quite sure how to explain.”

So, genuinely asking: does this overlap substantially with existing work I should know about? The places I’d guess it might already exist under another name — restorative justice literature, ecological/systems-theory ethics, trauma-informed care frameworks, truth-and-reconciliation scholarship, but I don’t know the literature well enough to know if I’ve reinvented something or actually found a gap. Curious what people who know these fields better think

If you proceed to make the simplest Google search, and go searching "The dangers of child sexuality", having the presumption you go in a critical way to find things about this interview, you might be surprised.

Michel Foucault, the Father of Critical Though as some might actually call him, made a public intervention on that interview about the laws of consent.

Can we approach this in a critical manner, or is it something that's long forgotten and doesn't have relevance for CT? I repeat, the interview is right there, the first result on Google (most probably) , so can we dissect this strange event and find out how Foucault's thinking actually works? It is, generally speaking, a type of thinking that it is working for the good, because he managed to open new fields of knowledge in Academia, as the biggest philosopher from last century that he is,and yet he made that type of argumentation. What is the REAL source for that argumentation, then?

"Jibreel Kateb argues that the pragmatist idealism advocated by Geese Magazine leaves Marxism defenseless against attacks on science in an age of irrationalism and climate crisis."

"The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism."

"What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality"

"Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God."