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 …
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 »