#romantic-idealism

#romantic-idealism

'What if utopia was never a destination, but a method?' This question frames the exploration of how utopia can serve as a tool for continuous adaptation and change.

Thoreau responded to the technological upheavals and social strife of the mid-1800s by choosing to temporarily step away from the everyday turbulence of that time to live more simply, thoughtfully, and purposefully.

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

The brain processes aesthetic experience like other rewards, such as food or money, indicating that the appreciation of beauty is deeply rooted in our neurological responses.

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.

Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story.

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.

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

It wasn't until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he'd signed up for: 'a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,' as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China's ministries of culture.

Unlike Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite paintings of winsome maidens surrounded by flowers, the 1877 chalk portrait of his sister offers a flat, realistic impression. She wears an impenetrable expression and dull-colored clothing that blends into an unadorned background. The somber tone is the product of family tragedy: Christina remains in mourning following the death of her older sister Maria, a writer and Anglican nun, in 1876.

Beauty, it turns out, is capable of launching not just an armada of ships, but a cascade of the same feel-good chemicals you get from being in love, eating chocolate, exercising, and having orgasms- dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin. It also lowers stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

True love is not transactional. If we only love on the expectation of being loved back, then it is not love, it is bartering. Love is unconditional. I love you, and that is all and everything. You do not need to do anything. You do not need to reciprocate. You do not even need to know.

Need a French poem to impress your date or S.O.? Love is in the air and here at Frenchly, we've got you covered. The French language has long been considered the language of romance, and French poetry is a beautiful way to say "je t'aime" to your love. Here are seven French love poems that will sweep anyone off their feet. We've included the original French version of each poem, along with their English translation.

Metaphors are linked to how we experience the world around us, according to seminal work by researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In English, we "move forward" with our lives and don't "retreat into" the past. We speak about people who are "cold as ice" and "heavy" matters we need to resolve. Some of these metaphorical expressions are more than just, well, expressions-they are actually based on our sensory experiences. This mind-body link is called "embodied cognition."

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

Have you ever experienced an encounter with an image in the sky or thought that the lyrics to your favourite song related to your personal life? These are examples of having moments that are either unsettling, poetic, or just plain strange. Such experiences are known as apophenia, expressions of our innate tendency to find patterns and attribute meaning to things that are random.

The short answer is yes, unless you take fiction for what it is-fiction. When you long for something you don't have, it can lead to dissatisfaction with what you DO have. Romantic fiction has witty, heartfelt dialogue, buckets of romantic gestures, and protagonists who have a preternatural ability to read each other's minds. It's easy to forget it is not real. This can set up unrealistic expectations both conscious and unconscious.

Happiness today is narrowly defined by some positive psychologists as a joyous state of mind or well-being. The happiness sciences see it as something you can calculate and quantify. They developed a Happiness Index and the World Happiness Report. These basically measure happiness as satisfaction, with criteria like gross domestic product per capita (money) and life expectancy (health) as some of the factors considered.

The simple feeling of being is the fundamental basis of every momentary perception. What's happening right now is the only starting point there could ever be. The simple feeling of being is without border or boundary. The simple feeling of being is inescapable. It is not something that needs to be created or generated or sustained or practiced. It is what is here already.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

This APA Blog series has broadly explored philosophy and technology with a throughline on the influence of technology and AI on well-being. This month's post brings those themes into focus recounting a vital Washington Post Opinion piece by friend of the APA Blog, Samuel Kimbriel. Samuel is the founding director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative and Editor at Large for Wisdom of Crowds. We collaborated on a Substack Newsletter about intellectual ambition, building on his essay, Thinking is Risky.

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.

Unlike me, Dan Dennett, or-I suspect-most scientists studying the brain, Richard maintains that science is: i) neutral between the view that consciousness is (to simplify) identical to parts of your brain and what goes on inside of it, and the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, found in all particles of matter (or, for that matter, other theories such as dualism and idealism) and ii) to be sharply distinguished from philosophy.

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.

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.