Philosophy

Philosophy

In previous posts, I argued that empathy, expressed in different ways-as feelings of compassion, an abhorrence of cruelty, and a wider circle of concern-is the core of a liberal worldview and a liberal political philosophy. I added, however, several important caveats: Liberals are not always empathic, conservatives are not always callous, and policies animated by empathy are not always wise.

How do words get their meanings? Why does the string of letters (and sounds) "d-o-g" mean "dog" and "c-a-t" mean "cat"? For the most part, meanings are conventions: A group of people (like speakers of a given language) agree that "d-o-g" refers to one type of animal and "c-a-t" refers to another. Other than a few words like "woof" or "ding dong" that sound like what they mean, there's usually no inherent relation between the sounds and the objects they denote. That's why "dog" is "chien" in French and "gǒu" in Mandarin Chinese.

I'm talking to my friend Nick, guy to guy, thirty-three stories above Boston in a swank eating establishment known as the Bay Tower Room. Seated among stiff Brahmin lawyers, Nick wears a spiffy blue blazer and a somewhat psychedelic holiday tie, a beacon of his foppish charm. He's a Renaissance mana pianist, computer genius, primo baseball player, amateur astronomer, lady-killer. And he's eight years old.

best summed up by Thomas Jefferson (1787), who wrote: "...ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended" (para. 2). On its face, Jefferson's point seems reasonable. If all you had to do was feign ignorance to get a case dismissed, there'd be crowds of people wandering around with blank stares and airtight alibis ("Nobody told me arson was frowned upon.").

From a distance, it looks as though people are praying. Their heads are bowed solemnly, their hands folded before them. But then I notice the phone. They are not praying-just looking at their screens. Since the arrival of the smartphone, rates of mental illness have risen sharply: depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide, especially among the young. Our attention has been captured, our inner lives fragmented, and our sense of self quietly distorted.

You've encountered them: people who feel like life is an ongoing struggle filled with endless problems. Or perhaps this is how you feel. There are valid reasons to feel this way. When you think about your life, it may seem like it's only filled with pain, regret, and tragedy. It's easy to hear someone say, 'just be happy,' but that can sound dismissive and trivial; the person speaking clearly doesn't truly understand your pain, and at some level, they don't seem to care.

Recently, I visited a part of my neighbourhood where there's a park. The green space was hived off by concrete walls, iron railings and barbed wire. From inside came the sound of laughter and the happy voices of men and boys. Outside, I saw women of all ages walking on the dusty road, banned from entering the park. I spotted some school-age girls carrying books and pens, talking together and walking the same path I once walked.

Most defenders of position diversity, however, have a more controversial policy in mind. They urge the appointment of faculty who hold certain opinions. For instance, if all the current members of a department are atheists or agnostics, position diversity calls for the next appointment to be a theist. Similarly, if all are political liberals, then preference should be given to appointing a political conservative.

Much attention has recently been given to discussing the effects, potential and actual, of artificial intelligence on clinical medicine. Many, like Sparrow & Hatherley, have begun anticipating and addressing the challenges arising from integrating AI into medicine, including concerns about privacy, bias, power, responsibility, trust, and empathy. Sometimes a dilemma is presented between, as Hatherley puts it, substitutionism and extensionism: either AI will surpass physicians in performing clinical tasks,

What interests me is not the spending itself but the consistent failure of rational intention. These are people who make complex decisions, manage budgets, and exercise considerable self-control in their professional lives. But something about the holidays systematically overwhelms their better judgment. The usual explanations, weak willpower or manipulative advertising, miss what's actually happening in the psyche. The answer lies in an alliance that Plato identified 24 centuries ago, one that modern psychology has largely overlooked.

You have food, you have alcohol, you have questions about what to wear, you have people you don't see very often, or who you see very often but not in this context. There's also a lot of pressure on the holidays in general. We have a lot of expectations that don't always align-like we want it to be a lot of different things, and maybe it can't be all of those things.

In recent years, provincial parliaments in Canada have increasingly used a legal mechanism known as the notwithstanding clause to suspend the constitutionally protected rights of Canadians. Often, legislation passed by invoking the clause has targeted the rights of various minority communities, such as transgender people or religious minorities. Traditionally, the only check on the clause's use has been the threat of public disapproval and controversy.

A nest egg of $18 million per year is very large. At a safe 3.7% withdrawal rate, the Redditor could spend $666,000 per year. Since the OP said he's spending $300K plus his mortgage payments, he's most likely well below that amount (depending on just how much the mortgage balance is). Since his income needs would be more than met by his savings, there's really very little reason to continue doing work he doesn't enjoy.

In modern digital communication, we see the growing relevance of so-called AI companions and AI that look like and seem to behave like humans. We see AI assistants in messenger services, as well as AI agents that are an "autonomous" part of chatbots. We have conversational agents at every stage of education. There is also AI that appears as clones of real people, both living and dead people, and, of course, AI that is used for romantic partnerships. What all these applications have in common is that they want to make us believe we are having a human-like conversation.

If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today's sense. Plato's Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details. To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set.

The story of technology is the story of continual disruption and displacement. New systems and processes send some skills into obsolescence, opening the way for new skills and workflows. Generative AI has triggered the latest "de-skilling." But chatbot technology isn't only transforming jobs and shifting our relationship with information itself. It is also inviting us to relinquish our cognitive independence and bring about a sort of dispossession that is unprecedented.

We often picture ourselves the birth of philosophical thought happening before the eyes of the Athenian citizens, mesmerized and horrified by the discussions and the hearings of Socrates, Plato, and so on. Nevertheless, the roots of what we call Western philosophy may be as foreign as any root we dig beneath the earth. Egyptian, Amerindian, Bantu, Chinese, and Indian traditions are often treated as strangers in the public square of philosophy, full of flies and chattering owls.

Being right is a victory for the ego. Being connected is a truth of the soul. We are always connected-all that fluctuates is our awareness of that reality. But in being right, we not only forget that truth, but we translate the pain of disconnection into the cost of our struggle. Of course things are hard-because the other side makes it that way. This is true whether it's our political enemy or viewing our partner as the enemy.

Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, ritus and superstitio.

Since Plato, a dominant strain of Western philosophy has understood human beings primarily as rational thinkers, a view typified by René Descartes's conclusion: cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am'). But in 1927, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger radically upended this tradition in his monumental opus Being and Time. Thinking and theorising, he argued, presupposes a special mode of being that is unique to humans: I am, therefore I think.

An intricate system of roads connected the furthest reaches of the Roman Empire, which at its height in the 2nd century CE spanned modern-day Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and England. A collaboration between researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, the Itiner-e project aims to build the world's most detailed map of Roman roads, with its dataset currently covering some 300,000 kilometres.

Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim is: You consciously experience something if and only if it's being broadly broadcast in a "global workspace" so that many parts of your mind can access it at once - speech, deliberate action, explicit reasoning, memory formation, and so on. Because the workspace has very limited capacity, only a few things can occupy it at any one moment.

I started thinking rationally. Unless magic is real, there isn't a god. Also, for everything good that happened, God was thanked, not freewill. But everything bad that happens, like an island for child sex trafficking, gets blamed on freewill.

Deepfakes probably are still best known for their bad uses. Just a couple of years after deepfakes hit the internet in 2017, the vast majority of deepfakes were pornographic, often depicting famous people doing things they hadn't actually been recorded doing. Later, deepfakes were being deployed for political destabilization, even as wartime disinformation tactics. For instance, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a deepfake spread on social media, falsely depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as telling his people to surrender.

In 1968, just months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at burning American cities and gave an assessment of what he was really seeing. "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard," he said. King wasn't excusing violence. He was diagnosing the problem as something even deeper than disagreement over politics or values. Beneath the unrest, he saw the pain of people who had been speaking for a very long time, and who felt that no one in power was listening.

Some time ago, a client came to me facing what seemed like a thousand decisions: where to live, which job to take, whom to love. As we worked together, those many paths narrowed to one persistent question: Am I loving the right person? Or, more precisely: Do I want to love this man, even if facts suggest I take other routes?

Most of us like to believe we're too sophisticated to confuse money with purpose. Yet a surprising number of people, especially younger generations, slip into that trap without ever consciously choosing it. The idea that "my purpose is to make money" has become so pervasive that it rarely gets questioned. It's simple, it's measurable, and on the surface, it makes sense.

when referring to God - often the deity described in the Bible - as "He." Whether it's Alanis Morissette's iconic portrayal of God in the 1999 comedy " Dogma" or Ariana Grande's titular declaration in her 2018 track " God is a Woman," the effect is the same: a mixture of irreverence and empowerment. It dovetails, moreover, with a ubiquitous political slogan: " The future is female."

On his visit to Turkey and Lebanon between Nov. 27 and Dec. 2, 2025, Pope Leo XIV met with political and religious leaders, celebrated Mass and visited historical sites. The trip marked the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which resolved core doctrinal differences, with the aim of advancing Christian unity at the time. The Vatican framed the visit to the two Muslim-majority countries as a gesture of interreligious dialogue, as well as support for local minority Christian communities.