Philosophy

Philosophy

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.

The encyclical will address the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, the Vatican said on Monday. In a break from tradition, Leo, who was elected pontiff in May last year, will launch the document during a public presentation on 25 May. He will be joined by lay speaker Olah of Anthropic, which is in the middle of a high-profile lawsuit with the Trump administration over the ethics of AI, as well as theologians Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo.

Yoruba does not center on sin or heaven-and-hell judgment, but on consequences and alignment in this life. It is practiced through prayer, offerings, altars, music, and ritual. It also understands death mainly as joining the ancestors rather than a final judgment, and generally do

Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it-and Socrates changed his life.

I oppose the death penalty. There are several reasons for this. First, I consider it barbaric. Second, I am uneasy with the idea of the state wielding such irreversible power (especially given that most states are less competent than we, and they, would like to believe). Third, the line separating those eligible for execution from those not eligible is forever elastic; its scope is always subject to expansion and reinterpretation. Finally, and this is less a philosophical objection than an experiential one, I have stood inside an execution chamber, at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. It is not a place I ever wish to see again.

Billings is widely considered America's first noteworthy composer, publishing six tune books and writing some 340 choral works - some of which are still sung today. Apprenticed at 14 as a leather tanner, he learned music in his spare time and became a renowned teacher of singing schools, which taught basic elements of music so people could sing hymns more confidently. He also became a staunch supporter of independence, one of the Boston "Whigs" who spearheaded the American Revolution.

Mentorship leaves an inheritance of values, connection, and belief carried forward by others. Education and leadership are ultimately relational, grounded in humanity and connection. Legacy lives through relationships, community, compassion, and the people we continue to shape.

I got my PhD in philosophy from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2007. After that I did a postdoc for three years at Princeton University in New Jersey, then a second postdoc at the University of Oxford, UK. I wrote my breakthrough game, QWOP, in 2008 while I was at Princeton. After that, I began a gradual pivot away from academia. Like many academics, including so many of my friends, the thought of leaving was at first totally unthinkable. It's not as though my philosophy career was going badly; I had secured prestigious postdocs and enough publications.

If all you start with are the fundamental building blocks of nature - the elementary particles of the Standard Model and the forces exchanged between them - you can assemble everything in all of existence with nothing more than those raw ingredients. That's the most common approach to physics: the reductionist approach. Everything is simply the sum of its parts: no more and no less. These simple building blocks, when combined together in the proper fashion, can come to build up absolutely everything that could ever exist within the Universe and explain the full suite of phenomena that have ever occurred, with absolutely no exceptions.

Many people think of "writing" as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, the first named author on record, to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been portrayed and defined in ways that suggest AI may not be "writing" at all.

My thesis is the creation of AI is not merely the most significant technological event in human history-it is a cosmic revelation. It is the moment at which the universe's purpose becomes most legible to itself. And quantum AI (QAI), by harnessing the fundamental uncertainty woven into the fabric of matter, deepens that revelation in ways we are only beginning to reckon with philosophically.

At first, I treated it as coincidence. Childbirth is unpredictable. Cesarean delivery can be lifesaving. Obstetric care is complex. No two births unfold the same way. But the pattern unsettled me, and I began to ask a different kind of question. Not just what was happening to these women, but what was shaping the information they were given when decisions were being made. What did these women actually know about how their risk was being calculated? And who, or what, had shaped that calculation before they ever walked into a consultation room?

In China, there is a movement called “tang ping”, or “lying flat”. It’s made up of people who refuse to be pressured by modern Chinese life and the work hours system “996”, which means you work from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week.