#philosophy

#philosophy

Theodore's experience with Samantha reveals a profound shift in understanding love, as he grapples with the idea of sharing an AI's affection with many others, challenging his human limitations.

"What turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future. That's turned out to be like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn't have predicted."

"We do not know what thinking is. But we do know when we are not thinking."

The discovery of a few pages from an original edition of Hugo's work would then be a momentous event. This is precisely what specialists in Empedocles are experiencing today.

The deeper I go, the more feminist I become! Yet my experience of academic philosophy has largely disclosed the opposite: a discipline that solemnly declares its devotion to openness proves curiously unsettled by me as a woman.

"I want to look back and share two lessons I think others would benefit from hearing: (1) remember that you belong, and (2) embrace the value of philosophy, especially in trying times."

Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, symbolizing the Divine, through seven valleys, ultimately revealing the Divine as a reflection of the self in relation with others.

Rumi argues that to love is to enter the unknown: to love is to empty the self of all self-knowledge entirely. He believes that emptiness is a paradoxical state of infinite fullness, allowing for the purest form of love and union with the divine.

Connell moves easily between philosophy, farming and writing, checking the oven and returning to a conversation that veers from cattle to climate change.

They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.

I grew up in West Baltimore where I experienced homelessness for almost the entirety of high school. For me, philosophy emerged in situations of precarity and uncertainty. Those formative years, spent not so much in a single home as in a patchwork of many, shaped what are now some of my central philosophical concerns: belonging, exclusion, and the status of those at the margins of society, those at the threshold of belonging.

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. She has been Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly since 2021, and serves as a member of the APA's LGBTQ representation committee. Her books include Reading Plato's Theaetetus (Hackett 2004), Knowing What To Do (OUP 2014), Epiphanies (OUP 2022), Trans Figured (Polity Press 2024), and A Philosopher Looks At Friendship (CUP 2024).

A few weeks ago, I asked 10,000 people this question and got thousands of replies back. Some, of course, were funny: "A job," "Some money," and a "girlfriend." Some were predictably context-appropriate: "An unanswerable question," "Time to think," and "A deep conversation." Others were oddly mundane: "Socks," "A mug," or a "book." When Diego said "a comb," I think he was getting personal. (You can find the best of the rest over on Substack.)

Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences.

I did not learn much about mechanical engineering at TUM due to my poor German skills. I ended up spending most of my time chatting with students from a wide range of disciplines. I was fascinated by the conversations about history, politics, law, art, literature, and philosophy. Because I knew almost nothing about these subjects, I felt like a child listening to thrilling tales of discovery in a new world. And like a child, I took those stories seriously.

Dictators like to move people around. Stalin, for instance. From the summer of 1941 through the fall of 1942, with the Russian front facing massive bombardment and Nazi troops on the ground, he decided to relocate civilians, and entire industries, to safer regions in the eastern Soviet Union. The Urals, Siberia, the middle Volga, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan eventually received sixteen million evacuees, perhaps the most ever moved across land by a single directive.

The student is Maggie Resnick, played by the dependably charismatic Ayo Edebiri. She's a struggling doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at Yale, and she puts her request to Alma Imhoff, brought to life by a striking Julia Roberts, over dinner. The pair are sitting in Alma's elegant apartment, a tasteful space warmed by rich wood paneling, amber light sources, and distinctive sconces.

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.

You have probably lost track of the number of articles about people who have jettisoned family members over contradictory and reprehensible political views. How do we get to the point that educated people, some skilled in philosophical argumentation, fail to make communicative progress with others? As the U.S. sinks further into fascism, why haven't philosophers' arguments against fascism caused fascists to do a regretful volte-face? Are non-fascist philosophers ill-equipped to deal with fascism? I ask those questions mindful of Stanley Cavell's statement that "Nothing a philosopher says can insure that you will not act immorally."

One of the biggest gripes I have about my academic field of social science is that it explains a lot about human behavior but is very short on prescriptions for how to live day to day. Even when it does have something suggestive to offer, the research almost never supplies evidence of whether its widespread adoption would have a positive effect. The same deficiency is even truer for philosophy, a realm in which big thoughts about life usually remain abstract ideas.

The 2026 Pacific Division Meeting will be a reimagined space for doing philosophy in new ways that includes a broader range of participants and innovative discussions.

A therapeutic goal is to replace self-destructive or self-defeating emotional rules with more functional ones and find healthier ways to respond to emotional experiences.

Anger is a bad habit that people tend to pick up from their parents. When a child who was raised at Plato's house was returned to his parents and witnessed his father shouting, he said, 'I never saw this at Plato's house.'