Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field of free will. What are exactly the kind of questions that are worth asking? What different kinds of experiments that can say something about conscious and unconscious decisions can help us be more modest in what we realize we can control, and what we can't? Generally, humans have a sense that they control themselves and sometimes their environment more than they do.
People really like Japanese philosophy. If you ever see a list of "untranslatable words" or "beautiful words from around the world," then you will notice how Japanese ideas are often overrepresented. Whenever I explore a Japanese concept on the Mini Philosophy social media pages - wabi- sabi, mono no aware, ikigai - they outperform almost everything else. Part of this, no doubt, is a kind of exoticism.
Just as an Indian carpet is interwoven with many threads of various colors to produce a perceivable pattern of harmony, Indian writings and religion are interwoven, perhaps in an even more complex way, to produce the pattern we have come to know as Indian philosophy. But for the novice, this pattern can be more than confusing; it can be overwhelming. Actually, one can begin in a systematic way to study and discover the various teachings of Indian philosophy, such as Yoga.
This short 1986 documentary follows the International Youth for Peace and Justice Tour, a programme in which teenagers from then-conflict zones around the world visited and spoke with high-school students across Canada. Capturing the tour's stop in Montreal, the director Premika Ratnam introduces viewers to teens from unstable or war-torn nations of the period - including Northern Ireland, East Timor, Namibia, Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Guatemala - as they recount their experiences. With wisdom often beyond their years, they discuss a range of hardships, from daily indignities and lack of job opportunities to witnessing torture and murder and fearing for their lives.
The phenomenon of evil has always been part of human existence but is particularly pervasive in our present times. By definition, we think of evil as being purely negative, pernicious, vile, vicious, and destructive. A noxious force and tragic existential fact of life that brings only misery, sorrow, and suffering to those accidentally or intentionally exposed to or victimized by it. Which, to some extent, includes each of us. But can the painful and devastating experience of evil and the profound suffering it brings possibly be productive, growth-enhancing, or psychologically and spiritually transformative? Can good come from evil? Can suffering be redeemed?
At first, it sounds like a design problem. Or maybe a customer service one. Add new markets, new systems, new customers, and suddenly the challenge is keeping what was working while trying to understand what the future needs to become. But underneath, it's a question about honesty. What if the kind of growth that stretches empathy and deepens awareness (the kind we expect from people) could guide how organizations grow too?
Two millennia ago, Aristotle distinguished between a life lived in pursuit of pleasure, which brings temporary satisfaction, and a life lived according to reason, virtue, and the pursuit of goals, which leads to true happiness. Therapeutic approaches of today tend to agree with Aristotle that fleeting pleasures aren't enough to make us happy and that a subjective sense of well-being stems largely from the way we live our lives.
What excites you about philosophy? Its application to everything! As an undergraduate, I was able to conduct research with philosophy professors and a philosophy of psychology professor. Now I teach courses on topics such as philosophical engineering and computer science ethics. And because philosophy is the foundational intellectual discipline, I believe it contains all the resources universities need to navigate rapid changes in information technology, political upheaval, social reorganization, etc. By emphasizing deep reading, critical thinking, and embodied ethics,
It is evident to the responding officers that Harvey is experiencing some sort of delusion, and since they cannot calm him down or convince him of his safety, they opt to detain him. The officers can do so, as in the United States, while the Fourteenth Amendment provides some guardrails to involuntary commitment, there is no federal statute regarding detention, and it is up to their discretion to detain him if they believe he could be a threat to himself or others.
There's a statement that one can make that would have been completely non-controversial at the end of the 19th century, but many people both in and out of science would argue against it today. Consider for yourself how you feel about it: "The fundamental laws that govern the smallest constituents of matter and energy, when applied to the Universe over long enough cosmic timescales, can explain everything that will ever emerge."
Yet, even within these critical frameworks, voices from within the Global South, especially women from marginalized communities, are often excluded or misrecognized. Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Lila Abu-Lughod have long argued that women in the Global South are not merely subjects of oppression but thinkers whose epistemic contributions are routinely devalued. They face layered forms of marginalization within both national contexts and transnational academic spaces, with epistemic injustice emerging as one of the most pervasive mechanisms of exclusion.
In her article "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception," Maria Lugones describes "world traveling" as the experience of oneself as belonging to a multiplicity of worlds, constituted by different cultural conventions, languages, and histories, which shape a person's self-understanding, behavior, and relation to others. While many engage in what Lugones calls "world-traveling" of necessity, simply by belonging to multiple worlds, she suggests that for others, undertaking world-traveling intentionally, and playfully, can cultivate loving perception across difference.
Today's web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising "One Weird Trick!" to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.
Only too often, our desire to grow is an indictment of who we are now. There can be an urgency and a striving to be a better person. It's even easier to take pride in an investment in personal improvement and refinement. The attachment to an individual upgrading carries a hope of finally attaining some measure of worth and the possibility of being lovable.
A jewel is a common metaphor used for awareness in many contemplative traditions. Like a jewel, we could say that awareness is both multi-faceted and precious. I've surveyed a large portion of the traditional and contemporary literature of nonduality from a wide array of traditions such as Buddhism (Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra, Zen, Thai Forest Theravada), Taoism, Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta, Kashmiri Shaivism), and Western mysticism and philosophy (Christian, Sufi, Judaism, Neoplatonism, Pyrrhonism).
There is an all-out global race for AI dominance. The largest and most powerful companies in the world are investing billions in unprecedented computing power. The most powerful countries are dedicating vast energy resources to assist them. And the race is centered on one idea: transformer-based architecture with large language models are the key to winning the AI race. What if they are wrong?
In an era of people-centered urban planning, 15-minute cities, " eyes on the street," and active public spaces, parking garages are often seen as the antithesis of contemporary urban ideals. But that was not always the case. If today they challenge architects and planners to reinvent them in pursuit of more sustainable mobility and more human cities, in the past they stood as witnesses to a radical transformation in how we move, inhabit, and perceive urban space.
After decades of research, there is still no clearly articulated scientific consensus on what sleep is or why it exists. Yet whenever sleep comes up as a topic of discussion, it is quickly reduced to its necessity and importance. Popular media remind us of what can, and will, go wrong if we do not sleep enough, and serve up some handy tips on how to overcome insomnia.
A riff on Jacques Derrida's riff on Karl Marx's claim that "the spectre of communism haunts Europe", hauntology is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that "what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate". Beginning from their perception that (Anglo) electronic music of the early 2000s had been unable to innovate, artistically or technologically, on that of the previous century,
The best horror stories are those that don't rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn't its eponymous effigy; it's realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance's maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.
He realized that a batch of letters he'd sent to landowners, offering to lease their rights, had incorrect information, including monetary amounts and other details. But instead of correcting the errors, Bentley doubled down, not wanting to admit his mistake. When the letters failed to secure enough land leases to generate big profits, Bentley tried to make up the difference by sinking his investors' money into new, risky deals, some of which faltered and drained the coffers of his company, Bellatorum Resources.
Some songs don't just fill the air - they fill the soul. "The Impossible Dream," from the musical Man of La Mancha, is one of those songs. When Don Quixote raises his voice to "fight the unbeatable foe" and "reach the unreachable star," we feel something stir deep inside us - a reminder that life's greatest meaning lies not in comfort or safety, but in courage and conviction.
In the face of the re-emergence of Trump's border-wall nationalism, Brexit, and increasingly strict European immigration policies, Hannah Arendt's reflections on human rights, statelessness, and her critique of sovereignty raise crucial questions: What could it mean to be a citizen in a political context where there is no nation-state? Can democracy, or more generally politics, be confined to the nation-state? Can we imagine an alternative? Is national affiliation the only framework through which rights can be guaranteed, or can we imagine a politics grounded in human plurality rather than sovereign exclusion?
For me, it was seeing that what was offered (by rightwing parties) was not relevant to where I was at the time as a student. I had no money, no job, no connections and no clue about where I wanted to go with my life. But I did know I didn't want to work in London, wearing formal office attire and being a slave to the nine-to-five grind for the rest of my days. The leftwing parties seemed to offer more inclusion and be more welcoming to ordinary folk like me. So that's where I looked for my political home.
We live in an era where the difference between real and artificial no longer startles us. Every day, it's there buzzing behind our screens and selfies. From avatars to synthetic voices and AI-generated images, the fake has become familiar and is an accepted part of our techno diet. But the more interesting question to me isn't how these illusions are made, it's why we all so easily believe them.
In her critically acclaimed short documentary A Move, the London-based director Elahe Esmaili returns to her hometown of Mashhad, Iran, to help her parents relocate for the first time in four decades. Esmaili's husband, the Iranian documentary producer Hossein Behboudi Rad, captures the trip as moments of familial tenderness and friction unfold. Inspired by Iran's 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement, which was sparked by the death
What might this be? Well, I don't have a complete answer. But I am convinced that the foundation is developing the ability to live with intention. Intention is nothing other than the ability to make free and conscious choices, and when we are able to do this consistently, we become the authors of our own stories, protagonists who co-create the world rather than being determined by it.
Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce's 1976 hit 'Car Wash' are the exception. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle).
The comment caused controversy, with many calling it upsetting and insensitive. What his comment also did, though, was get me to think about my own experiences with disability from a philosophical perspective. I am not disabled myself, and I specialise in Comparative Philosophy, not Philosophy of Disability. What experience of disability, then, do I have? It is rather, the experience I had with someone else that explains why I feel that I have a genuine stake in this debate.
