Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Yoshihiro Francis “Frank” Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the […]

Professor Dan Edelstein works for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests in literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities. Most recently, he has completed a book manuscript on the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (On the Spirit of Rights, forthcoming with […]

Priya Nelson is an editor at the University of Chicago Press. She acquires books for the Press’s long-standing and distinguished lists in anthropology and history. Exchange, value, religion, urban studies, media, epistemology, social theory, and ethnographic writing are topics of special interest, though anything that uses classic themes to investigate contemporary issues tends to catch her […]

Professor Alexander Key received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in May 2012 and started working at Stanford that same year. Professor Key is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature whose interests range across the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from […]

Dr Andrew Hui is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. He received his PhD from Princeton University in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a graduate of St John’s College, Annapolis. From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he taught in the Introduction to Humanities Program. He has […]

Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who lives in Los Angeles. Born in the Ural mountains of Russia, she moved to the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) to study Languages and Literature at Leningrad University. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and worked at Stanford University two years later as […]

Richard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to dissolve, rather than solve” sets of problems that should now be considered obsolete. This November […]

Entitled Opinions is on hiatus

On the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, Robert Harrison and Professor Andrea Nightingale engage in a lively conversation about Walden. This year our nation celebrates the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau. But few of the commemorations have considered Thoreau as a philosopher, focusing instead on Thoreau as a champion of civil disobedience and the […]

A conversation with William Hurlbut on the ethical implications of CRISPR-Cas9 and human intervention in the genetic makeup of life. William B. Hurlbut, MD, is Adjunct Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford University, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with […]