One of the ways tech billionaire Elon Musk attracts supporters is the vision he seems to have for the future: people driving fully autonomous electric vehicles, colonizing other planets and even merging their brains with artificial intelligence. Part of such notions’ appeal may be the argument that they’re not just exciting, or profitable, but would benefit humanity as …
Recent debates around transgender people and sexual diversity have been marked by essentialism, a profoundly conservative mindset with deep links to religious and metaphysical dogmatism. It is a stance through which conservative thinkers seek certainty in a world of change and fluidity. Essentialism comprises three key ideas. First, there is the idea that nature is …
While we may enjoy the company of companion animals or a fleeting encounter with wildlife, many people believe humans have a superior consciousness of the world we live in. Every now and then, though, new study findings about the surprising intelligence of other animals reignite this debate. Recently, two German philosophers, Professor Leonard Dung and …
Animal consciousness: why it’s time to rethink our human-centred approach Read More »
Ruben Östlund’s 2022 film Triangle of Sadness has attracted both praise and criticism as a satire of the world’s rich. Triangle of Sadness follows the familiar plot of a castaway story. A luxury cruise ship capsizes after a disastrous drinking session between the captain (an American communist) and a passenger (a Russian capitalist) in the …
A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government. But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that …
What Socrates’ ‘know nothing’ wisdom can teach a polarized America Read More »
To build a machine, one must know what its parts are and how they fit together. To understand the machine, one needs to know what each part does and how it contributes to its function. In other words, one should be able to explain the “mechanics” of how it works. According to a philosophical approach called mechanism, …
Can machines be self-aware? New research explains how this could happen Read More »
The 2024 presidential election is still a year and a half away, but it can feel much closer: President Joe Biden has made his reelection bid official, presumed candidates are giving out-of-state speeches, pundits are already weighing in on nomination hopefuls, and social media is, as ever, a mess of people trying to persuade strangers to back their …
How do we live good, fulfilling lives? Aristotle first took on this question in his Nicomachean Ethics – arguably the first time anyone in Western intellectual history had focused on the subject as a standalone question. He formulated a teleological response to the question of how we ought to live. Aristotle proposed, in other words, an answer …
“[The] city is a spatial figure of time in which present, past and future come together. It is, at times, a cause for astonishment and, at others, for remembrance or expectation […]. In this sense, the city is both an illusion and an allusion.” (Marc Augé, “Pour une anthropologie de la mobilité”). We head to …
The philosopher Marc Augé defined our cities. Now it’s in our hands to make them homey Read More »
In Moral Progress in Dark Times, German philosopher Markus Gabriel makes a case for a new enlightenment based on universal values, arguing that the democratic law-based state is a valuable vehicle for encouraging this “moral progress”. The aims of his book are admirable, but Gabriel is only partially successful in explaining what the new enlightenment might …