This symposium opens with a provocation: What are animals for? The question almost solicits its own rejection, invoking as it does one of the central tenets of much animal advocacy: animals are not for anything, and they ought to be …

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but the older sister who directed most of my childhood games was a future novelist. A special incantation transported us to Fairyland, where the rooms of our house became the chambers …

Every year, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services releases data on the number of animals killed at the Commonwealth’s animal shelters, including the facility operated by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), located in Norfolk, Virginia. …

What sorts of philosophical problems do we face because of the existence of non-human animals? Most humane people would agree that their existence presents us with some moral and legal quandaries. And recently, but only recently, philosophers have taken a …

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Four years on, the heady idealism of 2008 makes me cringe …

If you have spent any significant amount of time in some kind of creative endeavor you have probably also spent a lot of time being bored. Your day tends to be unstructured and open, leaving room to do nothing that …

When Amy Chua published an article in the Wall Street Journal last January entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” people were offended. The article—an excerpt from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—makes the case for a “Chinese” style of parenting in …

Harvey C. Mansfield is a professor of government and political philosophy at Harvard, where he has taught since 1962. He is the author or translator of fifteen books, including The Spirit of Liberalism (1978) and A Student’s Guide to Political …

It is a beautiful Sunday evening in May—clear, still, warm—and I am throwing up my own shit. That this is biologically possible, let alone how it feels and how the nurses will respond to it (a faintly perceptible ripple of …

My teaching incorporates ruptures and shock; I will lecture on unassigned readings; I will surprise rather than illuminate. I will light the fires of imagination; I will light real fires.