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This essay discusses hope and optimism with reference to current rhetoric around COVID-19. It draws on Spinoza to suggest that much of that rhetoric rests on questionable assumptions about the supremacy of human reason within Nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on "Persian Letters," a literary work by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, French social commentator. It offers literary strategies of Persian Letters and explores the related issue of the interaction of philosophical content, literary form and narrative strategies of the book. It mentions the experience of two Persian noblemen who are traveling through France.

This article accounts on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical life in her early correspondence with Rene Descartes, a philosopher. The aim of the author is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker, and examines Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction.

This paper discusses the philosophical significance of 'September 11' by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori's dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate 'September 11' to Kant's versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the use of philosophical imagination in assessing historical intersection between philosophical ideas, social practice, and institutional structures in Australia. Functionality of the ideas of terra nullius and the doomed race; Analysis on the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians; Role of feminist reading in rethinking process of inclusion and exclusion.

Focuses on Jacques Derrida's later writings to establish the reading of Derridean temporality as a counterbalance to statistical probability. Calculation of probabilities to give a mastery of Fate or Fortune; Sense of possibility and multiplicity in the texts of the tradition; Problem of chance and necessity in Stoic philosophy; Interpretation of the Greek notion of fate; Sense of freedom in modern philosophy.