Month: September 2023

Does wearing a mask stop the spread of COVID-19? Is climate change driven primarily by human-made emissions? With these kinds of issues dividing the public, it sometimes feels as if Americans are losing our ability to agree about basic facts of the world. There have been widespread disagreements about matters of seemingly objective fact in the past, …

Why can’t Americans agree on, well, nearly anything? Philosophy has some answers Read More »

Mary Wollstonecraft has had something of a revival in recent years. Though considered the mother of first-wave feminism, the 18th-century philosopher long endured her share of trolls refusing to take her seriously. She was dubbed a “hyena in a petticoat” by contemporary politician and writer Horace Walpole, accused of being “unsexed”, unladylike, and of having …

Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism Read More »

“ChatGPT is a natural language generation platform based on the OpenAI GPT-3 language model.” Why did you believe the above statement? A simple answer is that you trust the author of this article (or perhaps the editor). We cannot verify everything we are told, so we regularly trust the testimony of friends, strangers, “experts” and institutions. Trusting …

ChatGPT can’t lie to you, but you still shouldn’t trust it Read More »

Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die? These questions sound like …

Why government budgets are exercises in distributing life and death as much as fiscal calculations Read More »

Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I set aside my academic work as a fellow in public philosophy to report on civilian life in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities and to examine the state of higher education in Ukraine. Public philosophy, in dialogue with other forms of scholarship, journalism and thinking, translates esoteric ideas into accessible writing …

Why a new centre for civic engagement in Ukraine could help counter Russia’s invasion Read More »

Warning: the following article contains spoilers for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Having enlisted an old friend to babysit our little girls, my husband and I hopped on the bus to see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once as our almost once-in-a-year date film. In the cinema, I started to wonder: why on earth I am …

Oscars 2023: The philosophy of Everything Everywhere All at Once explained Read More »

Baseball moves very fast. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. Just try coaching a Little League game; decisions pile up like branches on a tree, as tactical and strategic considerations multiply. And as a player, when it’s time to act, you need to do so before you even get to the “t” in “think,” …

Against baseball’s new pitch clock Read More »

In 2021, Kohei Saito’s Capital in the Anthropocene became a publishing sensation in Japan, eventually selling more than half a million copies. That astonishing achievement becomes even more extraordinary when one considers that Saito, an academic at the University of Tokyo, has for some years been rearticulating materialist philosophy based on a close reading of Karl Marx’s …

Friday essay: could a reinterpreted Marxism have solutions to our unprecedented environmental crisis? Read More »

The story of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and his posthumous reception almost reads like the plot of an airport spy thriller. Heidegger rose to global fame with Being and Time (1927). This work, which shaped philosophical existentialism, claimed Western culture had lost touch with what he portentously called the “meaning of Being”. We have become too preoccupied …

Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti-semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today Read More »

As utopian oases dry up, a desert of banality, and bewilderment spreads … – Jürgen Habermas (1986) The last few years have been truly catastrophic. One might easily argue that, during “The COVID Years”, we have witnessed more dramatic social and political change than at any time since 1939-1945. In terms of its scale and …

Friday essay: in an age of catastrophe is there still a place for utopian dreams? Or might our shared vulnerability be the key? Read More »