This article examines the transformation of American universities into a central political battleground over the past decade, focusing on the intersection of federal policy, identity politics, and the production of knowledge. Tracing developments from Donald Trump’s first presidency through his second term, it analyzes the impact of executive intervention in research funding, the dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, and the narrowing of academic freedom, particularly in relation to debates over Israel, antisemitism, and student protest. The article also situates these developments within a broader intellectual context, arguing that the crisis of academic freedom cannot be understood without reference to deeper epistemological tensions within the humanities, including presentism, identity-driven scholarship, and the erosion of disciplinary norms. Rather than framing recent events as an isolated authoritarian turn, the essay interprets them as symptoms of a longer-term structural crisis affecting the American university system.
Classics are essential to the Humanities. The worldwide assault on the Humanities from both the ‘Woke’ left and the anti-Woke right often targets the Classics first. This article concentrates on Wales. Classics (together with the study of religion and theology) has gradually been eradicated from the constituent colleges of the University of Wales since the turn of the millennium. My piece focuses in particular on recent changes at Cardiff University, where cuts have targeted Ancient History and Religion/Theology. The removal of these subjects represents a victory for an instrumentalist view of knowledge that runs against the founding principles of the institution.
Exposomics has become a leading framework for examining how lifelong environmental exposures shape human health. We draw on historical and philosophical scholarship to situate its political epistemology and outline possible future paths. Historically, exposomics fits within a neo-Hippocratic tradition that links knowledge of environments and health to political priorities and interventions. Within this frame, two political epistemologies emerge: an internalist approach focused on biological tracking of environmental effects, and an integrative approach encompassing broader social and environmental layers. Both face notable epistemic and political limits. Drawing on analogical historical and contemporary cases, we identify three potential trajectories for exposomics – techno-solutionism, evidential pluralism, and fundamental-cause reasoning – each presenting distinct opportunities and challenges.
Environment and landscape are often set in dualistic opposition: the environment is taken to denote the substantive processes involving the flows and energies of ecosystems, while the landscape is understood as a cultural mode of representing and perceiving framed portions of the environment. Drawing on a phenomenological conception of landscape, this article challenges a dualistic interpretation of its relationship with the environment, while preserving the aesthetic significance of landscape experience without reducing it to mere cultural taste or artistic representation. The dualistic framework is overcome by returning the aesthetic qualities of landscape to the environment itself, in the form of aesthetic potentials rooted in environmental affordances that can be perceptually activated from different perspectives. This move anchors the emergence of landscapes to the substantive processes that shape environments. In conclusion, holism and pan-perceptuality are singled out as two defining features of a substantive understanding of landscape.
This paper examines the condemnation of Apologia pro Renato Des-Cartes contra Samuelem Parkerum by Antoine Legrand by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, situating it within the broader context of the reception of Cartesianism. Through an analysis of the documents preserved in the Archives of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the study reconstructs the censorship process that led to the prohibition of the work in 1719, focusing in particular on the two censures drafted by Giuseppe Maria del Pezzo and Matteo Basile da Parete, both transcribed in the Appendix. The analysis highlights the doctrinal and disciplinary motivations behind the condemnation, showing how the Apologia, while presenting itself as a formally orthodox and scholastically structured defense, was perceived as a systematic legitimization of Cartesian method and metaphysics.
