For the last thirty years, The Harvard Review of Philosophy —edited entirely by undergraduates— has published an annual journal of professional philosophy. Being the world’s only journal of its kind in print, copies have reached over a thousand universities and libraries worldwide.

Founded in 1991, The Review published its first issue a year before Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history, a concept he borrowed from the German philosopher G.F. Hegel. He argued that history’s ideological struggles —the gradual realization of reason in the world— will culminate in liberal democracy, when “the actual is rational and the rational is the actual.” Yet, if the past decades have shown us anything, it is that history is far from rational and that reason is far from being instantiated; the past couple of years, and indeed months, have magnified the fault lines in our global liberal order.

This has led The Review’s editors to the conclusion that philosophy, or, more specifically, philosophia, “the love of wisdom,” should not merely be about construing certainties in the abstract. It is about a different idea, one also associated with Hegel—capturing the spirit of the time. In German, the word for this is “zeitgeist.” While the purpose of Zeitgeist as an entirely undergrad-run magazine is to provide an opportunity for students to read and write accessible philosophy on their own terms, we have a more ambitious goal, too: capturing, as best we can, the spirit of our time—political, cultural, artistic, and personal. We think no one is better suited for this project than students coming to intellectual maturity at a time as important, dynamic, and ever-changing as ours.

Sincerely,

The Zeitgeist Staff