Philosophy

Philosophy

I retired two years ago, which threw me (not all at once, but in waves) out of the resume-building, ladder-climbing life I'd known since my early twenties. And it has slowly been relocating my center of gravity from what author Albert Brooks calls resume virtues to eulogy virtues-from those devoted to earthly success to those devoted to emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

Sometimes, you can be talking to someone for hours, and it feels like only a few minutes. You natter and natter without ever having to think of what to say or cringe through any awkward silence. There's a gentle sway to things - you listen, they speak, they listen, you speak. The chat dances to the easy and comfortable rhythm of the conversational tide.

Thinking forward is an automatic process. Cause, then effect. Input, then output. A to B. It feels logical-and normal to start with a conclusion, then find justification around it.But we can always take our thinking a step further. Sometimes, the best way to get the answers you want is to think backwards. It's called mental inversion. Turn the whole thinking process upside down. As the great algebraist Carl Jacobi said, "Invert, always invert."

As AI adoption accelerates, the consequences-intended and not-are becoming harder to ignore. From biased algorithms to opaque decision-making and chatbot misinformation, companies are increasingly exposed to legal, reputational, and ethical risks. And with the rollback of federal regulation, many are navigating this landscape with fewer guardrails. But fewer guardrails doesn't mean fewer consequences-only that the burden of responsibility shifts more squarely onto the businesses deploying these systems. Legal, financial, and reputational risks haven't disappeared; they've just moved upstream.

For most of my life, I attended reluctantly, dreading the long hours of prayer. I was proud to be Jewish, taking satisfaction in my people's survival and success despite the attempts to annihilate us. But I was also embarrassed by what I perceived as Judaism's weirdness and obsolescence: all those nitpicky laws, and that implausible, reward-and-punishment God I thought was portrayed in the liturgy.

For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for "that which withholds" the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat;

In terms of judicial killings in Europe, the period between 1500 and 1700 outstripped any era before or after. The new heresies of the Protestant Reformation prompted an initial burst of executions: approximately 5,000 people were put to death for their religious beliefs in the 16th century. This was followed by far deadlier witch hunts, which saw about 50,000 people legally exterminated for witchcraft.

Here is the beginning of an answer. At least for some people, some of the time, loving someone means altering the shape of one's identity to include the beloved. That is, the beloved becomes part of one's identity. Among the many ways one thinks of oneself-as someone with a certain profession, a certain taste in music, or in art-there's also seeing oneself as someone's partner.

The runner who lost by a fraction of a second. The inventor who had the right idea at the wrong time. The poet whose words only mattered long after they were gone. These people rarely make the highlight reel, yet their efforts often bend the world in directions we don't notice until much later. The truth is, the almosts aren't failures. They're the ones testing the edges, reaching further than most dare.

In the fourteenth verse of the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the text explains Jesus Christ's entry into the world in two brief sentences: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

When I first started researching antinatalism a few years ago I presumed its proponents would be losers and edgelords. You know, those men who love playing devil's advocate. Incels masquerading as philosophers and 14-year-olds who have just discovered Nietzsche. The world's most famous antinatalist academic, David Benatar, has a book called The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys. I remember rolling my eyes back into my skull, thinking: here we go.

At the end of August 1939, the German archaeologist Otto Völzing discovered around 200 fragments of carved mammoth ivory at the back of a cave in southern Germany. With war just a week away, Völzing's find was hurriedly collected in a box, where it lay unnoticed in a museum archive for decades. It wasn't until the 1960s, when the shards were inventoried, that something astonishing emerged out of the heap of broken pieces.

"The man (person) behind the camera" refers to an observer or witness not only to the surrounding world, but also to one's own sensations, feelings, impulses, instincts, thoughts, and experiences. Seeing more than their external and internal environments, this observer has a higher level of awareness, the cognitive awareness of awareness, or meta-awareness. Within the animal world, humans have been described as uniquely being aware of being aware.

On many college campuses, tensions are sharper than ever, and for some students and faculty, simply sharing an idea carries a deep sense of hesitation. My work over the past several decades has focused on teaching evidence-based thinking to navigate such charged environments. This approach becomes especially relevant when we consider the twin processes psychologists call assimilation and accommodation, which describe how we learn and adapt to new information.

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The transformation of American public opinion on same-sex marriage is among the most remarkable and rapid shifts in moral consciousness ever recorded. Since the late 1980s, public approval of the practice climbed from 11 per cent to 70 per cent, where it has remained stable since 2021. What explains this? This is in part a puzzle about democracy. On its face, democracy offers the promise of voice and foment, of revolution without war.

Why do we care about who we are? After all, as I argue in my latest book, there's not much we can do about it. No matter how much we try to modify our behaviors and habits, and whether we succeed, we will still inevitably end up being us, even if that comes with the capacity to feel that we are not being ourselves, that we are changing, or becoming a better version of ourselves.

Many men of faith struggle with the silence of God. That absence forces the faithful to look for the signs and wonders that act as His guideposts as they seek to fulfill His desires. Many wind up filling that void with their own noise and bluster, mistaking the echo of their voice for God's own. Is this Dabo's sin? Is this why he is being punished? Is he even being punished at all?

But I would argue that free speech is actually the antithesis of violence. It's really a revolutionary way for human beings living in complex societies to facilitate collective action. But when you suppress it, it becomes a pressure cooker, and it's much more likely to erupt into violence. If you're allowed to criticize the government, criticize different ideas, you have an opportunity to change things for the better according to your beliefs.

The child is expected to take a specific role in that world, a place that is stable and certain. The rules and goals are set by the adults in the child's world. At the same time, at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world. It is open to all possibilities, even those beyond the child's physical limits. It's as if the child is free in a room, with walls, ceilings and floors that protect it from actual danger.

What is the relationship between disability and well-being? (In this post, I'll call this the Relationship Question.) The Relationship Question is both enormously complex and highly fraught -philosophically, socially, and politically. Philosophers have starkly different views. One prominent view, held by Elizabeth Barnes, is that disability is a Mere Difference: having a disability does not, on its own, make one's life go worse, although in our ableist society, disabled people are more likely to live worse lives because of barriers and stigmas.

Randy Pausch had every right to do whatever he wanted. After all, he was a highly reputable professor at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Virtual reality was his area of expertise, and at the time it was a groundbreaking technology. He first started out in 1997 after clinching a role with the coveted Walt Disney Imagineering team. He could have dived deep into the technological advances he had made in VR, having many papers under his name.