By David Pan · Friday, April 5, 2024 Telos 206 (Spring 2024): The Intuitive and the Conceptual is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 We often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are they something separate and qualitatively different than concepts? Are they just fuzzy concepts? Do they really exist at all? These are crucial questions because they lead to conclusions about the status of concepts themselves. If the alternative to clear concepts is nothing at all, then the sociopolitical corollary would be that the alternative to conceptual knowledge and the holders of such knowledge would also be nothing at all. By contrast, if intuitions are separate from concepts and real, then expert knowledge might possibly have some deficiencies in comparison with intuitions. The essays in this issue of Telos explore in one way or another this question of the status of conceptual knowledge as opposed to intuitive awareness.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, December 3, 2020 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie about their article “In the Swarm of Byung-Chul Han,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 15, 2020 Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 While “going viral” has taken on a new meaning by recuperating an old one, it is the virtual experience that seems to be more enduring. Not only has the pandemic sped up the shifting of human activity onto virtual platforms, but the viral dynamics of social media seem set to outlast the microbial versions: it has turned out to be easier to lock down the Wuhan virus than President Trump’s Twitter feed. Yet in both cases, it is unclear whether it is the actual spread or the fear that is the greater danger. For this fear leads to the call for more authoritarian measures, whether this means censoring Twitter posts or locking down the population. But if viral spread leads to the reassertion of sovereignty, we also come to realize that the freedoms we have taken for granted are in fact the result of a curated space, in which the rules for interaction have always formed the hidden framework within which our lives have unfolded. As these framing conditions come into focus during the crisis, we have the opportunity to reimagine them in such a way as to retrieve sovereignty not as a kind of authoritarian reaction but as an understanding of how our values must inform the boundaries we set. This issue of Telos considers how the experience of going viral has come to dominate our political life as well as how our reflection on this process can free us to consider the alternatives.
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