Author: Mark Kingwell

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His most recent books are the essay collection Measure Yourself Against the Earth (2015), Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters (2017), and Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019).

Sidney Hook

By: Mark Kingwell

American philosopher SIDNEY HOOK (1902-89) enacted the key dilemmas of twentieth-century politics. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian Jewish parents, he attended City College of New York, the same “Harvard of the Proletariat” that would educate […]

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Harpo Marx

By: Mark Kingwell

ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]

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Louis Althusser

By: Mark Kingwell

Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court […]

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