There's a strange custody battle happening today, and the courtroom is in your own head. It's not between divorcing parents or rival siblings; it's between your innate capacity to think and the increasingly seductive technology that promises to do the thinking for you. In my earlier post on the borrowed mind, I warned about a precarious drift toward cognitive passivity and how this results in a hollowing out of thought when we accept answers too quickly and fail to embrace the value of curiosity.
This distorted view of humans in which we use ourselves as some sort of standard to which individuals of other species should strive is not only arrogant, but singularly ill-informed. We clearly need a new mindset, a paradigm shift in which we de-center ourselves and work alongside other species to change the dismal road on which we are currently and recklessly traveling. Christine offers that and much more.
Several wealthy lucky right-wing tech bros will get to hear Peter Thiel speak tonight at SF's Commonwealth Club on the topic of the Antichrist, which is a funny thing to claim to know about when you've got all manner of Jeff Epstein connections. There is apparently an emerging evangelical Christian movement going on in wealthiest pockets of the tech industry. This stands to reason I guess, because tech wants to control the masses, and religion has always proven an excellent way to control the masses.
While purporting to be motivated by pro-life (or at least anti-death) principles, these laws and bills are fundamentally misogynistic. They have three fundamental functions. The first is to appease a key portion of the base. Second, couched in pro-life language, these laws provide excellent dog whistles for misogynists. The male misogynists generally understand that the message being sent to them is: "Your baby in her body. Her body in your kitchen. Making you a sandwich to put in your body."
Whereas for Kant time is one of the categories of the human mind that structure our experience, for Bergson, the duration of time is an absolute reality, and, as a first step, we can know, in our immediate consciousness, the duration of our inner life directly. From that basis, through his four major works, he opens a new path to intuition which he deepens and expands as his philosophy progresses, beyond our own lives to life in general and to the vital principle of all things.
It is only in this existential reality of the present where decisions, choices, behaviors, and actions can be initiated. What that then means, in terms of bullying, which only takes place as a choice in the present, is that one can choose to be a bully, or one can choose not to be a bully. Either choice will have consequences, for which the individual will be and is responsible (Falla et al., 2023; Menesini et al., 2013; Purje, 2014).
As would be expected, some people are enraged when a swap occurs. Some are open about their racist or sexist reasons for their anger and are clear that they do not want females and non-white people in certain roles. Some criticize a swap by asking why there was a swap instead of either creating a new character or focusing on a less well-known existing character.
You may have seen my TEDx talk. If so, you know its premise is having the courage to take a leap. My first story was about the first time I jumped off a high dive at the swimming pool. The second story was the leap of coming out. Both of those were scary. Did they prepare me for leaping out of plane 14,500 feet in the air? Not so much. You can't die from the first two.
Then they return with force, helping us understand today's world, explaining how and when it fell apart, and what allowed someone like Donald Trump to rise to power. The American theorist, a leading voice in progressive thought, dissects causes and consequences with surgical precision in each of his books, and never shies away from bringing some of the great ideas of classical and contemporary thought to everyday citizens.
Inuendo Studios presents an excellent and approachable analysis of the infamous Gamer Gate and its role in later digital radicalization. This video inspired me to think about manufactured outrage, which reminded me of the fake outrage over such video games as Cuphead and Doom. There was also similar rage against the She-Ra and He-Man reboots. Mainstream fictional outrage against fiction involved the Republican's rage against Dr. Seuss being "cancelled." Unfortunately, fictional outrage can lead to real consequences, such as death threats, doxing, swatting, and harassment.
I'm glad this letter reached you before you fed that assignment prompt from your Creative Writing professor into ChatGPT. I'd like to share some ideas that may be helpful as you decide whether to follow through on that plan. First of all, I'm sorry you've been finding the poetry unit of Introduction to Creative Writing so tedious and uninspiring. It's true that you probably won't be writing much poetry in your future career.
To what extent does the digital world create a culture in which responsibility is denied or avoided, and what are the consequences of this failure to take ownership of a problem? Taking responsibility may well be a predictor of psychological good health. Owning one's own problems empowers individuals, and creates internal motivation-lessening the chances of depression, produced by a sense of powerlessness; and reducing anxiety created by not seeing how to cope with an issue.
While this drug is best known as a horse de-wormer, it is also used to treat humans for a variety of conditions and many medications are used to treat conditions they were not originally intended to treat. Viagra is a famous example of this. As such, the idea of re-purposing a medication is not itself foolish. But there are obvious problems with taking ivermectin to treat COVID.
The biomedical animator Drew Barry is known for his dazzling visualisations of biological processes that unfold on microscopic scales. As enlightening as it is arresting, his imagery straddles the line between science and art, as seen in his work as the in-house animator for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and in his music video collaboration with Björk.
Our world is obsessed with authenticity. As I illustrate in my latest book, we want authentic brands, authentic leaders, authentic influencers, and authentic products. "Authenticity" is slapped on labels from organic food to handmade soap to political campaigns. On social media, being "raw" or "real" is the ultimate currency. Even at work, organizations urge us to "bring our whole selves" to the office, as though that were always desirable for anyone involved.
To read Frederic Gros's A Philosophy of Shame is to be reminded of how vulnerable we are to the emotion's inhibitions and agonies. We shame, we are ashamed, and we expend significant energy imagining shameful situations so we might avoid them. Shame makes us vulnerable to humiliation and ruin, and provides a method by which we can humiliate and ruin others. The cycle is often self-perpetuating: shame begets shaming.
At 8.30am sharp, a white van pulls up to the North Carolina college campus where the Outsiders are huddled in their black shirts, sleepy-faced but in good spirits. They pile in quickly, knowing there is a tight schedule to stick to. A 10-minute drive from campus, then the van pulls up under the arch of a large metal gate crowned with razor wire.
My wife and I, our son and daughter, and my in-laws share a single house in the Long Island suburbs. Our place is big, but crowded: all of us have hobbies, and so every shelf or surface contains toys, books, art supplies, sporting goods, craft projects, cameras, musical instruments, or kitchen gadgets. Before the table can be set for dinner, it must be cleared of a board game or marble run.
As a master's student in philosophy at Ewha Womans University in South Korea, I joined the Ewha Saturday Philosophy Class (ESPC), a Philosophy for Children (P4C) program, as both an organizer and lecturer. ESPC is a semester-long, biweekly program for students ages 8-16, based on Matthew Lipman's P4C curriculum. As a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa, I've been co-teaching middle school students at ESPC (this time online) and participating in the Iowa Lyceum, a week-long online summer philosophy program for high school
Emerging technology has permeated our intimate relationships, altering how we connect, maintain bonds, explore desires, and define love. Online dating platforms, virtual dates, and romantic exchanges via social media remain essential beyond the pandemic, sustaining relationships in the digital realm. Meanwhile, pornography algorithms, innovations like smart sex toys, sexbots, and AI companions can enhance physical intimacy and challenge taboos, providing new avenues for individuals to engage in sexual practices on their own... or directly with artificial products.
Kenya's arid north has always stirred the imaginations of those who visit. Its open, scorched bushland distributed over exposed geological formations and crosscut by riverine tentacles never fails to elicit impressions of emptiness and remoteness. To most outsiders, this is a timeless land. It is beautiful but unproductive, so the imaginary goes. It is backward. Its vulnerabilities - drought, famine, conflict, poverty - are inherent. Radical change is needed: a new way of doing things to unlock vast untapped potential and bring prosperity.
For this intimate project, he dusted off his parents' long-buried VHS recordings, most of them shot before he was born, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The footage depicts the pair as their homeland was experiencing a fragile new sense of hope, and follows them on their travels while working for the World Bank, documenting journeys to countries including Vietnam, India and Cuba.
We are delighted to announce a new call of applications for the "Works in Progress" series, a part of the 四海为学 "Collaborative Learning" Project. This series aims to provide an academic forum for graduate students and early career scholars engaged in Chinese or comparative philosophy to share and improve upon their projects with peers in conference-style panel presentations. Each session features a chairperson, 2-3 presenters, commentators, and an audience of participants who will provide constructive feedback on content, structure, or presentation style.
Academic and writer Marina van Zuylen, who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard, left Columbia to devote herself to an unusual project: Bard College's Clemente Course in the Humanities, which offers free humanities courses that can later be converted into college credits. She taught there voluntarily for 25 years, until a philanthropist decided to fund the initiative and turn her commitment into a professorship. This is a clear example that Van Zuylen's priority is not personal recognition.
For Fredric Jameson, for instance, while modernism "thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being", postmodernism "looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds". The latter definition, encapsulating the cultural logic of late capitalism, is all the more intriguing in the context of music culture, since it has found so many breaks to play around with.
"Wokeness", like "cancel culture" and "critical race theory", is ill-defined and used as a vague catch-all for things the right does not like. In large part, the war on wokeness has been manufactured by the right's elite. In part, the war arises from grievances of the base. There are even some non-imaginary conflicts in this war -at least on the part of the Americans that can be seen as blue-collar workers.
Perfectionism is philosophically encapsulated by an existential conviction. Many perfectionists are not only certain of the objective validity of their rigid way of living; they're also emboldened by the sense that their lives have an objective meaning, afforded to them in the way a god may grant his messiah a grand objective. Peers and loved ones question the perfectionist's obsessiveness because its root is often hidden, protected from the slings and arrows of reason. Perfectionism persists in large part because it remains unchallenged.
Bruno Latour is an intriguing person. He first caught global attention with his (and co-author Steve Woolgar's) 1979 book Laboratory Life. In this work, Latour and Woolgar observed laboratory scientists ethnographically. Meaning, they'd follow scientists similar to how primatologists would follow chimpanzees in the wild. White coats were investigated in their natural habitat. This way, Latour thought he could analyse the behaviour of scientists and verify how discussions, negotiations, and rivalries shape what becomes "knowledge."
Claire Becerra is a Ph.D student in philosophy at Northwestern University, with interests in the philosophy of language, social epistemology, and the philosophy of education, all of which are informed by her indigeneity. She is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and currently splits time between Chicago, New York City, and Arizona. What are you working on right now? These days, I'm spending most of my time developing my dissertation, which applies a philosophical lens to indigenous land acknowledgments.
A Boston Leather District condo broker, hearing of a distant land with a single, magnificent pearl, left his prosperous real estate office and journeyed for years to find it. He endured hardship, faced dangers, and spent his fortune. Finally locating the fabled shore. There, to his dismay, he found the pearl was not an object, but the land itself-a place of peace and beauty discovered only by those who embraced true spiritual wealth through their faith.
