A philosophical essay is an exploration. An adventure.
The questions
Every good essay starts with a good question.
A philosophical essay is an exploration. An adventure.
Every good essay starts with a good question.
Most young American thinkers don't know what philosophy can look like from someone at their age. Antipodes exists to address this.
In French secondary schools, philosophy is perhaps the most important core subject, required for all high school Terminale students regardless of academic focus. In South Korea, ethics classes are mandated for students.
American students aren't less capable of philosophy, they are simply less often shown what it can look like. Students elsewhere are capable of writing serious philosophical essays in English, often in their second or third language, and often in a few hours.
Antipodes illustrates what philosophy can look like to interested American students, and allows them to connect intellectually with thinkers and writers across the world. We collect the best of philosophy from students around the world, and seek to inspire others by making it accessible to them.
What philosophy actually looks like. Not a list of dead men and their positions, but the live activity: considering a hard question, building an argument, meeting the strongest objection to it, and arriving somewhere.
A reason to start. The point is not that anyone should admire these essays. It is that someone should finish one, disagree with it or come up with ideas, and want to formalize their own thoughts in an essay of their own.
These are student essays, not professional philosophy; they are not a survey of the discipline and they are not a curriculum. Rather than a way to study philosophy as you would in a class, Antipodes seeks to show how students can create novel, independent philosophical arguments.
Antipodes is edited by secondary students in California.
Much of what we publish first won or placed in a national or international philosophy competition. Those essays have already been read closely by philosophers, which is a better filter than anything we could apply on our own.
Every essay carries a short note from us at the top. It says what the argument is doing and why it's worth twenty minutes, without giving away where the essay lands. If you're reading philosophy for the first time, start there.
If you've written something you think belongs here, or you have a question about the anthology, write to sami.rahim3@gmail.com.