About Michael Steinberg

Earth, water, fire, and air Met together in a garden fair, Put in a basket bound with skin: If you answer this riddle you’ll never begin.             –The Incredible String …
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Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.                         –Goethe, Faust, Part One.[i]

In explaining his choice to present a Critique of Pure Reason instead …
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I am a devotee at a South Indian temple a few miles south of Rochester, New York. It’s caste and gender neutral, at least in theory, and its murti, which …
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I moved to Canada during the Vietnam war and almost by accident found myself an undergrad at Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I’m anything but Catholic, but …
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The subject of self-consciousness is strewn with intellectual land mines. There is no consensus about what kind of consciousness this is or what it is that we’re conscious of when …
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There is a bat in our bedroom. We don’t know how it got in, but bats can crawl through the narrowest of crevices and passageways, and our old house is …
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If cats are conscious but not self-conscious—that is, if they do not split experience in two and constitute an inner self which stands at one remove from all other perceptions—they …
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Above is our cat Oliver, in a photograph made by my wife Loret. Oliver is four years old. He takes to visitors, though he can be skittish, and they take …
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In the English-speaking world Johann Gottlieb Fichte (17623-1814) is treated as what one might call a footnote philosopher, mentioned—if at all—only in connection with someone or something else. He is …
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At some point we will have to admit that we have failed. We will not have averted catastrophic climate change. We will not have spread prosperity as far as it …
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