In recent years, political debate has degenerated into ever more aggressive partisan mudslinging and character assassination, with no room for a reasoned and non-rancorous discussion of competing alternatives in assessing the policy issues of the day. This trend is only likely to intensify as we enter a presidential election season in the United States in …
What would Aristotle think about the current state of politics? Read More »
Weil is one of the 20th century’s most remarkable and paradoxical figures. She was born in Paris in 1909 into relative affluence, but she came to identify intensely and actively, with the poor and vulnerable. (This led her to take leave from teaching, at one point, to labour within the harsh factories of Paris.) A …
Guide to the Classics: Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots Read More »
With the death of Jimmy Buffett, the feathers of his loyal network of fans – affectionately known as Parrot Heads – collectively drooped. Over the course of his career, Buffett earned their love by transforming himself into a kind of musical shaman who offered transport from the banalities of everyday life to the bounty of …
The beautiful pessimism at the heart of Jimmy Buffett’s music Read More »
In June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines by claiming the company’s LaMDA chatbot had achieved sentience. The software had the conversational ability of a precocious seven-year-old, Lemoine said, and we should assume it possessed a similar awareness of the world. LaMDA, later released to the public as Bard, is powered by a “large …
Why ChatGPT isn’t conscious – but future AI systems might be Read More »
“There is a word in Korean – inyeon. It means providence or fate. But it’s specifically about relationships between people.” So writer Nora Lee tells her American lover when they meet on an artists’ retreat in director Celine Song’s new film, Past Lives. The film tells the story of two lives unfolding in parallel, converging …
Past Lives: inyeon is a Korean philosophy of how relationships form over many lifetimes Read More »
The default psychological setting for human beings is an unavoidable self-centeredness. We each stand at the center of our own thoughts, feelings and needs, and thus experience them in a way that we cannot experience the thoughts, feelings and needs of others. As writer David Foster Wallace put it in a 2005 commencement address: “ …
How do you create a generation that can think its way out of problems and face the challenges of a rapidly changing world? The Davos meeting this year is all about how we can cope with the immense challenges posed by the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – an era of rapid and complex technological change, …
What philosophy can tell Davos about educating for a better future Read More »
In a recent TED talk titled No Philosophy, No Humanity, author Roger Sutcliffe asked the audience whether a flagpole was a place. Around half the audience said yes, the other said no. He went on to describe the response a nine-year-old gave him to that question: to me a flagpole is not a place, but to …
Today is UNESCO World Philosophy Day, a day aimed to “underline the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual”. However, it was not so long ago that philosophy was the target of university funding cutbacks. Philosophy is commonly painted as a discipline defined by ivory tower musing …
Love, wisdom and wonder: three reasons to celebrate philosophy Read More »
Callicles, Ray Hadley and Daniel Dennett? “A great deal of philosophy doesn’t really deserve much of a place in the world,” leading philosopher Daniel Dennett has recently suggested in an interview at his year’s Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference in Buenos Aires. “Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum …