A big one for me is the ability to let others be wrong. It's not up to any of us to tutor others in the ways of righteousness. That doesn't mean never challenging anyone, but rather not getting emotionally invested in changing their mind. This is especially relevant in our political climate, but also it's important for one's own peace.
Translating from scratch the complete dialogues of Plato, probably the most influential philosopher of them all, is a truly monumental task. Yet a brand new translation has just been unveiled. The Dialogues of Plato, all 1,320 pages of them, are published in print by Gandon Editions and are also freely available online, courtesy of the Foundation for Platonic Studies, at platonicfoundation.org/translation.
'More songs about Buildings and Food' was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don't sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce's 1976 hit 'Car Wash' are the exception.
Renowned Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo says that pain is fundamental to human existence - not merely an incidental experience, but its very starting point. Pain is the price of consciousness, freedom, and choice itself. Reflecting on this insight, I recognized a profound yet rarely acknowledged truth: every choice we make inherently involves regret, so there are no completely pain-free paths in life.
In Troels Carlsen's exhibition Alt flyder - Everything flows - nothing is permanent, and everything is connected. Flora and fauna are quite literally intertwined in Carlsen's large tableaus, often painted with acrylics on intricately collaged archival material sourced from antiquarian bookstores. Dynamic, dancing skeletons with bodies of radiant green springy stems and lush leaves sprout blackberries and pink wildflowers, surrounded by bumblebees. Bodies, bees, flowers and fruit are interdependent in an ancient biological choreography.
I did not learn much about mechanical engineering at TUM due to my poor German skills. I ended up spending most of my time chatting with students from a wide range of disciplines. I was fascinated by the conversations about history, politics, law, art, literature, and philosophy. Because I knew almost nothing about these subjects, I felt like a child listening to thrilling tales of discovery in a new world. And like a child, I took those stories seriously.
We as subjects cannot be aware of ourselves as objects unless we consist of two distinct things. The brain receives signals from the body to control internal body environment. These signals are also interpreted as subjective emotions in addition to perceptions of body state. Since our microbiomes differ from us, their signals have a distinct nature from other body signals.
Marxists often view figures such as Rawls as apologists for the status quo, while many liberals associate Marx with political positions that have too often practiced oppression while preaching emancipation. Nevertheless, the canonical representatives of these two traditions have more in common than commentators generally realize. Perhaps most significantly, we suggest that Rawls himself, who worked hard to place his own thinking in the history of political philosophy, also misunderstood his relationship to Marx's views, and came to overestimate the scope of their disagreements.
Since the 1930s, the La Quebrada Cliff Divers of Acapulco in southwestern Mexico have performed shows for the public, climbing steep and jagged oceanside cliffs and jumping up to 100 feet into the waves. In Voices From the Abyss, the Mexican directors Victor Rejón and Irving Serrano capture the divers in cinematic black and white, bringing to life the moments of fear, rushes of airborne adrenaline, and exciting fanfare that characterise their work, which, even for those who've been diving for decades,
most of the propositions I'm interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath.
I wasn't expecting a conversation about single cells and cognition to explain why a large language model (LLM) feels like a person. But that's exactly what happened when I listened to Michael Levin on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Levin wasn't debating consciousness or speculating about artificial intelligence (AI). He was describing how living systems, from clusters of cells to complex organisms, cooperate and solve problems. The explanation was authoritative and grounded, but the implications push beyond biology.
The numbers are striking. Videos tagged #shadowwork have accumulated over 2.3 billion views on TikTok. The Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen, a self-published workbook based on Jungian concepts, outsold every other book on Amazon in September 2023-including Oprah. It has now sold over a million copies. Jordan Peterson's lectures on Jungian psychology have drawn millions of viewers to concepts like archetypes, the shadow, and individuation.
His near-death experience followed a severe fall from a ladder: fractured ribs, internal bleeding, loss of consciousness before the ambulance arrived. "They told me afterwards it was close," he says, rubbing his palms together as though checking for dust that isn't there. "Very close." I ask him what he considers the most significant insight from the experience. He looks at his calloused hands for only a heartbeat before answering: "The essence of all is encounter and connection," he says. "Love means recognizing that the other should be exactly who they are-and wishing them well, genuinely and honestly."
Appel grew up in the Lamb of God, a patriarchal Christian covenant community. As he recounts in his newly released memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, members "pledge[d] fealty to a small group of self-appointed leaders," men served as "coordinators," women as "handmaids" (yes, that is what they were called), and wives were required to obey their "husband-masters."
Schadenfreude seems to permeate American politics these days as viral clips and memes of politicians making real or AI-generated gaffes and off-color remarks are gleefully shared by ideological foes. The German word, which means taking delight in another's misfortune, describes a response that was once taboo to express openly. Now it's been embraced by partisans as a powerful weapon to reinforce political support and group identity.
Nearly one in four US adults provides unpaid care for a relative or friend because of ageing, illness or disability - a responsibility that can place a heavy yet often hidden burden on carers. Part of a PBS project on caregiving that aims to put faces and names to these statistics, the short documentary Lean on Me offers a small window into the lives of Greg and CoRy Wyszynski, a father and son whose relationship fuses care with deep camaraderie.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, unfortunately, didn't have much to offer us in his consolations about death, but, more importantly, he succeeded in helping us believe that life was worth living, even if this was somewhat unintended; he was a nihilist through and through. Philosopher David Bather Woods, in his new book Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist, chronicles Schopenhauer's life and thought in a manner resembling a parable.
In debates over mounting political polarization, few concerns are voiced more often than the loss of compromise. The decline of bipartisanship is often treated as both a symptom and a cause of democratic dysfunction-a sign that democracy is becoming more fragile and divided. Despite consistent public support for leaders willing to meet in the middle, meaningful compromises between political opponents are increasingly hard to come by.
First off, Todd May has quickly become one of my favorite philosophers of the present. I first got acquainted with Todd May via the show "The Good Place". His first work I read was Death, which helped me a lot with my own understandings, feelings, and thoughts about death. Especially around the time of Bart's death, and I remember going for a hike at Governor Dick and reading it.
When you picture Santa Claus, a white, bearded, overweight and jolly man who dashes around delivering gifts to children during the Christmas season probably comes to mind. Yet, not everyone who dons the red suit fits this stereotype. That's what Bethany Cockburn, Borbala Csillag and I learned when we teamed up to study professional Santas. For our study, we looked into how these professional Santas were able to "be" Santa, even if they didn't fully fit the image.
