I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I'd spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care.
been ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology but can no longer be denied or avoided without serious consequences. As C.G. Jung (1961) presciently put it, "Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. . . . We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us let alone what to pit against it."
If you feel shame, recognize that no one else can shame you; only you can make yourself feel ashamed. Only you have the power to create your emotions-positive, negative, helpful, or unhelpful. The Stoics Hundreds of years ago, the Greek and Roman Stoics advanced that insight. In his treatise the Enchiridion, Epictetus wrote: Men are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about those things. In his Epistles, Seneca stated: Everything depends on opinion.
Plato's Politeia (the work we call The Republic thanks to Cicero's Latin mistranslation) describes the soul as having three parts: reason ( logistikon), spirit ( thumos), and appetite ( epithumia). But throughout the dialogue, Plato also describes a fourth element... repeatedly, and by name. He calls it the auto politeia (self-constitution): the governing principle that determines how the three parts relate. Plato has it in the text. His readers have looked right at it and counted three for 2,400 years.
Do you blame others for the choices you are making? Have you blamed others for the previous choices you have made? To shed more light on these questions, you might also ask yourself: "What am I responsible for, and what power do I have?" From there, you might agree with this self-reflective response: "I am responsible for, and I've got the power over what I think, do, say, learn, and choose" (Purje, 2014).
The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that's the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression? The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you'll be far more persuasive than you've ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.
An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen's latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say "unfortunate" not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you'll find yourself taking account of the numerical scrum in your life. And that exercise gets unnerving fast. KPIs, BMIs, OKRs, credit scores, savings rates, social media likes, screen time, steps walked, hours worked, hours slept,
There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can't understand life, we're probably missing something essential about intelligence.
Given the field of philosophy's paucity of Black or African American philosophers, it is still something of an oxymoron to be a Black or African American philosopher. It is still possible to get second looks when saying, "Oh, I'm a philosopher." Being a Black or African American philosopher doesn't compute within a culture, and within academic settings, where images and discussions of Socrates and Plato or René Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre dominate what philosophy looks and sounds like.
From November 1909 until August 1912, an unknown assailant - or assailants - zigzagged across southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. Many Black families were slaughtered in their homes under the cover of darkness. An ax - the telltale weapon - was almost always found in the bloody aftermath. All but one of the scenes were located within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Sunset Route. In each case, a mother and child were always among the victims.
I grew up fervently anti-religion, like Don up there. "The opiate of the masses," and all that other shit. To me, every public Christian was either a shitbag televangelist or, even worse, a politician. My favorite comedian was Sam Kinison, a former preacher who turned on his church. I didn't simply disagree with religious people, I looked down on them, like a Ricky Gervais-type would. I thought this made me more rock-and-roll or whatever.
Such an event, if it transpired on Earth today, would see kilometres-thick ice sheets gouging their way from the Arctic to the Bahamas. Once-diverse ecosystems and climate zones would merge into a single, uniform condition, seemingly destined to be barren. Scientists once argued that such a 'snowball' state could never have existed on Earth since global glaciation could not be reversed. Moreover, on such a world, all life, including our own ancestors, would surely have been extinguished.
For it is in examining the people like Dr. King, that we can see how yoga can not just make us feel calmer and more peaceful, but can really affect change in a world that is in deep need of healing. By his words, and more importantly his actions, Martin Luther King Jr. showed many of the principles that are central to and deeply embedded in yoga philosophy.
For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively-deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises-while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM's words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.
I am using the word pragmatism in a specific sense. I am not speaking about being pragmatic as a political tactic; deciding what issues should be given priority and what battles to choose, or a willingness to compromise, or a recognition that there are limits to what can be accomplished at any time. I am writing now about pragmatism in a meaning closer to its philosophical origin in the writings of William James-that truth is not found in abstract principles or beliefs,
At a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci. Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted and often mangled by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman.
Cicero, the Roman Stoic, once wrote to his friend Varro, pending a visit to his home: "If you have a garden in your library, we shall have all we want." This same desire for good books and natural beauty is at the heart of Byung-Chul Han's In Praise of the Earth, in which he reflects on gardening as a form of philosophical meditation.
A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.
When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."
Kensington, for those not from Philly, has long had a reputation for potent but affordable street drugs. Interstate 95 and the Market-Frankford elevated commuter train line provide easy access to the neighborhood for buyers and sellers, and abandoned buildings offer havens for drug use and other illicit activity. St. Francis Inn Ministries, which was founded by two Franciscan friars in 1979, serves sit-down breakfast and dinner for thousands of people each year, many of whom suffer from poverty, homelessness and substance use disorder.
Walking through a field one day, a 17-year-old schoolteacher named George Boole had a vision. His head was full of abstract mathematics - ideas about how to use algebra to solve complex calculus problems. Suddenly, he was struck with a flash of insight: that thought itself might be expressed in algebraic form. Boole was born on November 2, 1815, at four o'clock in the afternoon, in Lincoln, England.
I'm finding it difficult living up to my morals where is the line between compromising a little, versus becoming complicit in what I don't agree with? I'm one of those people who believes we can each take a role in solving big problems, and that we should try to make things better where we can. For this reason, I've ended up working in public service and try to reduce how much meat I eat. I'm vegetarian 60% of the time, which is not perfect, but I believe doing something is better than doing nothing.
We don't often call people stupid. Unlike its sibling concepts of dumbness and idiocy, stupidity isn't really a personality trait. Of course, you might think someone is stupid, but when we use the word, we tend to limit it to moments of stupidity. We say "Well, that was a stupid thing to do" or "You're being stupid." Stupidity is a blip.
The singularly most important question we will ever ask is, "Who am I?" Generally speaking, we are not taught how to answer that question. We don't commonly even ask it. That is, until we reach a place where we are screaming into the abyss, waiting for the sound of an echo. And then, we want to know. But do we have to get to the edge of the abyss before we can even think of asking that question?
Even in sports that do not literally hand out points for style, the matter of aesthetic value is of discursive import. The most dominant athlete or team in the world can be taken down a peg or two on the moral underpinnings of play style. There are hoops (ethical) and hoops (unethical). You can win, but what is it worth if you do not win beautifully? You can lose, but at least you suffered beautifully when it counted.
In Indra's Net of pearls and jewels, every gem reflects every other, a shimmering image of interdependence. This ancient Vedic metaphor for connection across the cosmos also illuminates what the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht first proposed in 2014as 'theSymbiocene': the era after the Anthropocene, in which human technologies take their cues from living systems and work in partnership rather than through dominance.
Making good decisions doesn't merely rely on how much information we take in; it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we've instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation - incorrect information that doesn't align with factual reality - then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.
Fifteen years ago, Egyptians from all walks of life took to the street to demand "bread, freedom, social justice." They were protesting the oppressive 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Egypt had been under martial law for 31 years. This meant that political opposition was silenced, and opponents were often imprisoned and tortured. Police brutality was the norm. Egypt's economy was also weak and relied heavily on foreign aid and loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The way most people think about time is wrong. The notion that we share a 'common time' moving in a single direction is a useful illusion but, as physicists have understood since the discoveries of Albert Einstein, it doesn't comport with our understanding of the Universe. However, as the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli argues in this short documentary from Quanta Magazine, this doesn't mean we should abandon the concept of time altogether.
I have been teaching Introduction to Philosophy at least once a year since 2012, beginning in my second year of graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center. Teaching in New York City shaped me in countless ways, and each new iteration of "Intro" has pushed me to refine the course-even if only incrementally. The class I teach now at Binghamton University looks very different from the one I first taught as a graduate student using a borrowed syllabus.
'Orcas are psychos,' quipped a close friend recently. He wasn't joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world's leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video's closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:
In The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Harvard philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that human flourishing rests on two distinct 'cornerstones of our humanness': connectedness and the longing to matter. Connectedness—what we often call belonging—is 'the feeling that there are particular others who are prepared to pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not.' It is unconditional, relational, and necessary. But it is not sufficient.
