Faith in progress is a characteristic we often associate with the Victorian era. Victorian intellectuals and free-thinkers who believed in progress and wrote hi

Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an

Daniel Stoljar presents a persuasive rejection of the widespread view that philosophy makes no progress. He defends a reasonable optimism about philosophical pr

My initial interest in sociology stemmed from the desire to see specific social change in certain areas of my native United States of America. My rather naive a

In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is repres