By David Pan · Monday, September 20, 2021 Telos 196 (Fall 2021): Thinking vs. Doing is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The dichotomy of thinking versus doing seems to arise out of our own sense of the difference between our minds and our bodies. On the one hand, the gap between mind and body is the basis of the perspective with which the mind can step back, criticize, and improve the world. Without this gap, we would be trapped in an eternal present, unable to imagine anything but what currently exists. On the other hand, the dichotomy can lead to a sense of detachment from the world. Such detachment can be negative if it leads to an isolation from the world, or to a sense of alienation if the world is such that its influence on the body becomes oppressive for the mind. The opposition between thinking and doing directs our attention toward this fundamental gap between the mind and the body within the human condition that is the source of both all human achievement as well as human debasement. As we focus on thinking, our detachment from our actions can allow us to make judgments about the wisdom of our actions, but such detachment can also lead us to bury ourselves in contemplation and ignore our responsibilities for acting, or even allow us to act with a kind of cruel coldness in trying to realize an abstract idea. This issue of Telos considers such different possibilities for the way in which we relate our thinking to our actions.
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By David Pan · Friday, September 25, 2020 Telos 192 (Fall 2020): Truth and Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a strong temptation to oppose the idealism of truth to the realism of power in order to criticize and turn away from politics as a base pursuit. Science, facts, and ideals are cited as the objective truths that so often are ignored in favor of ideology, lies, and self-interest by those who wield power. Yet this opposition between truth and power can itself become a dubious tactic, as it is often the speaker who seeks to define an opinion as truth. This situation is complicated by the circumstance that there are three forms of truth that are often merged in such discussions.
First, there are natural scientific truths that even autocrats and totalitarians do not seek to deny, as they are the source of the technological tools that can support any attempt to maintain power. Here, there is certainly no conflict between truth and power. Not only does political power depend on technological achievement, but natural scientific facts cannot be covered up by lies and ideology for long. Consequently, political actors must pay attention to natural scientific and technical knowledge, even if they then instrumentalize it in different ways.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 11, 2018 Telos 183 (Summer 2018), celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Telos, is now available for purchase in our store.
 Telos began this anniversary year with our previous issue’s exploration of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., tragically assassinated fifty years ago in April. That too was 1968, the excitement of profound social change and the bitter taste of disappointment. So much in our culture today remains framed by that specific polarity. Now, in this issue of the journal, we take stock more broadly: not a judgment on that one year but a return to some of the key themes that have defined Telos. We have been able to carry on these discussions thanks to the vision of the founder, Paul Piccone, the support of our publisher, Mary Piccone, the dedication of our editorial group, the intellectual agility of our authors, and the loyalty of our readers. Thanks to all.
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By Thorsten Fuchshuber · Thursday, March 24, 2016 If we want to gain a deeper understanding of the specific relationship between the ethical and the political in current times, we have to talk about the mediating agencies that enable this relationship. And if what the announcement for the Telos Conference 2016 in New York states were really true, namely, that at “the theoretical level, political reality has come to be seen as divorced from ethical life,” we need to ask: what has happened to these mediating agencies? That is exactly what the German philosopher Max Horkheimer was doing with his racket theory. He never explicitly referenced the “ethical” as a philosophical category. Yet he was able to show that in post-liberal societies, the social instances that made the relationship between the political and the ethical possible in the first place, are being destroyed—or they are at least tending towards a loss of their reflexive function. For Horkheimer this is at the core of what he called the racket society: that ultimately, every reference to universality and to society, or in German to the Allgemeinheit, is lost.
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By Lukas Szrot · Tuesday, November 25, 2014 As Popper has written in several articles and his autobiography, he encountered Marxism as a young man in Austria around 1919. For two or three months he called himself a communist, but soon turned against the doctrine after the deaths of pro-communist demonstrators was justified with what Popper considered pseudo-scientific jargon. These events made him a fallibilist acutely aware of the distinction between dogmatic and critical thinking. (34)
 This emotionally powerful and philosophically significant experience colored Popper’s views of Marxism, the call for revolutionary social change, and the utopianism that foments it. In light of this, it is not difficult to see why Popper and (in particular early) Critical Theorists might have found much about which to disagree. Robert D’Amico discusses myriad points of contrast between Karl Popper and the Frankfurt School, though from the outset he acknowledges that the “infamous ‘methodology dispute’ in German sociology that occurred primarily between Popper and Adorno . . . is best described as a misfire” (33). Despite this alleged “misfire,” D’Amico’s analysis raises profound questions that continue to gain attention and prod ongoing debate in terms of the philosophy, theory, and methodology of the social sciences.
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