#bernard-williams

#bernard-williams

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

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.

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.

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

He took it, managed to decipher my terrible penmanship, and wrote me a reply. I didn't ask him weighty questions about politics, I think I probably asked his favorite color. People's favorite color was a major interest for me when I was eleven. He wrote some questions for me, (perhaps also my favorite color, which was blue.) and soon we were in a conversation, the kind of sweet conversation where a thoughtful grown-up pays attention to a child.

The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea—that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are—remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian realism, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation.

There's a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It's not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It's more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There's no one there. There never was.

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

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?'

Spinoza was an heir to both Jewish and Christian culture-in Amsterdam he grew up in a Jewish community within a Protestant society-yet he distanced himself from both these religions. He did not want to be a member of a religious institution with strict, prescriptive codes of belonging and belief. He feared-quite rightly-that a [institutional religion would constrain philosophical freedom].

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

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."

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.

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.

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.

What does it mean to say that you are restrained solely by your own morality, by your own mind? The conscience is often described as an inner voice telling us what to do when others may be opposed. A moral compass is that which distinguishes between right and wrong, good and bad. Our conscience, our moral compass, sets the groundwork for doing the right thing.

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.

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.

What do you envision when you think of meekness? You probably see a mousy doormat, someone sheepishly acquiescing to the will of the stronger. When Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," you might think that those wimps will hand it over without a whimper or word of objection to stronger, more ambitious people. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called meekness "craven baseness."

In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human. How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values. Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject, arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign

I'm finding it difficult living up to my morals where is the line between compromising a little, versus becoming complicit in what I don't agree with? I'm one of those people who believes we can each take a role in solving big problems, and that we should try to make things better where we can. For this reason, I've ended up working in public service and try to reduce how much meat I eat. I'm vegetarian 60% of the time, which is not perfect, but I believe doing something is better than doing nothing.