Philosophy

Philosophy

There comes a time in every skeleton's death when, upon their being discovered in a grave hugging another skeleton, modern people start foaming at the mouth guessing at what that relationship might have been. This is understandable and quite defensible from my perspective as a modern person. An embrace is a gesture that transcends however many centuries might separate us. Of course we might wonder who these two people were to each other. We might want to know the nature of their love.

An analysis by Linch Zhang posted on the forum LessWrong found certain paragraphs of Magnifica Humanitas to be between 40 percent and 100 percent written by AI, according to the popular AI detector Pangram. The document includes known traits that appear in AI-generated writing, such as a higher use of the word “genuinely” - which crops up in writing by Anthropic's Claude - than previous encyclicals, Zhang says. Another person ran the text of the document section by section through Pangram, finding that 62 percent of its first chapter was flagged as AI generated. When The Verge ran roughly 2,000 words of the document through Pangram, it estimated that 46 percent was AI-written.

Elsewhere, he preaches, "Godly women want to feed their men. Godly women are designed to make sandwiches. When women were granted the right to vote, we were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families." On social media, tradwife and momfluencer aesthetics translate this political theology into a lifestyle brand with immaculate kitchens, vintage dresses, slow living, and a constant stream of homemade bread, ja

AI is now woven into the fabric of education. According to a 2026 study from the Higher Education Policy Institute, "AI use is now almost universal," with 95% of students reporting use of AI in some capacity. The question is no longer whether AI will be used, but how we should teach in light of its ubiquity.

Spend time on social media and you will see debates with titles like "I destroy MAGA mom on vaccines" or "Conservative philosopher owns feminist student." These popular videos focus on clip-worthy gotcha questions, one-line zingers and screaming matches edited for virality.

What many people don't realize is that the academic subject of mathematics is not about doing quick sums and subtractions in your head. In fact, it wasn't until I went to university that I understood what truly drives this abstract discipline. Mathematics is about creating worlds. To do this, you establish a foundation from a few conclusive assumptions, so-called axioms, on which you gradually build.

In the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God's own attorney-to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. "Theodicy, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for 'vindication of God.'"

As Muslims gather for the annual pilgrimage of Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, they will circle around the "Kaaba," a black cube draped in gold-embroidered cloth. A ceremonial textile - known as the "kiswah" - covers the Kaaba, around which Muslims will walk seven times in a ritual known as "tawāf." It is the central act of the annual pilgrimage.

Collecting, he says, is about "cultivating a taste and aesthetic and kind of a worldview," but also "an excuse to learn more and to follow my curiosity." There is pleasure, too, in the chase: "If you feel like you've gotten one over on the market, it's really exciting," he admits.

In the beginning, nothing excited me about philosophy. I didn't take a single philosophy course as an undergrad. When I was doing a Masters in an entirely unrelated field, a friend (now my husband of nearly 50 years) told me about his graduate-level aesthetics class. "Wait. So these people think they can determine what art is without being able to draw their way out of a paper bag?" I asked in some umbrage.

Christianity has long been closely identified with Western civilization. The association is especially strong, in modern times, with the United States of America, that source of derisively quoted, quite possibly apocryphal arguments that "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our children." But of course, Jesus never heard a word of English, and though the spread of the religion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death - to say nothing of after Constantine's - it took its sweet time getting to the American continent.

For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of slave morality over the natural master morality. By pretending that meekness is a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence. But the old master morality cannot be completely vanquished, leaving us thoroughly confused.

Loyalty-a virtue elementary schoolers can explain clearly-has long seemed to confuse the United States government. Some administrations have equated it to patriotism, others to partisan allegiance. Some have tried to manufacture it: In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower declared May 1 to be Loyalty Day, an anti-Communist alternative to the labor movement's May Day that hardly anyone now celebrates. Americans don't throng to International Workers' Day parades either, so the national disinterest in Eisenhower's holiday seems to suggest that loyalty doesn't happen on command.

“One percent of taxpayers pay 40% of all the tax revenue; the bottom half pay only 3%. I think it should be zero,” Bezos said. “I think there's something very powerful about zero.”

Churches are made up of people, and people are imperfect. Like any community or group, there can be experiences that make someone feel it's time to leave. But those experiences don't necessarily reflect a person's faith, beliefs, or values. This is simply a space for people to share their own journeys.

There's a chart doing the rounds on social media, ranking philosophers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it says, are basically a cop; while for Dionysus the Renegade, Marx and Parmenide, it declares: They're not punk, punk is them. I have no way of knowing how true this is, or whether Zizek belongs so close to Engels, for example. To memorise this list would be beyond useless, like retaining the instructions for a plane you have neither licence for nor any reasonable prospect of flying.

Pierre de Coubertin didn't stumble into the creation of the modern Olympic Games, he painstakingly designed them around a clear civic purpose: that sports could model fair play, international respect, and the ethics of effort over victory.