The best word in the English language—and there are a lot of good ones, from the onomatopoeically perfect gurgle to the aggressively sharp cantankerous—is, without a doubt, ineffable. Dictionary.com defines ineffable as “incapable of being expressed or described in words; inexpressible.” For example, you could rave about the “ineffable beauty of God,” or say “being a [...]

Every now and then, the NYT’s philosophy column, The Stone, will run a piece that is only tangentially related to philosophy, if that.  Yesterday they ran another such piece, but this one is actually worth reading.  In it, philosopher Robert Pippin argues that the quasi-scientific, “research-based” paradigm that drives scholarship in English departments toward things like critical theory has some [...]