Philosophy

Philosophy

A client came to see me after what she described as "three hours of hell." Her sister had left a voicemail that sounded "off"-the tone was different somehow, clipped maybe, or strained. My client's mind immediately jumped to the worst: someone in the family must have died. She spent the rest of her afternoon constructing elaborate scenarios, planning what she'd say at the funeral, worrying about how her elderly mother would cope.

In a far away land, the following facts are true and known to everyone: 1) A person who ingests a poison will die within the hour UNLESS that person ingests a stronger poison, which acts as an antidote and restores complete health. 2) Smith and Jones are the only manufacturers of poison. 3) Each makes several types of poison. 4) All poisons have different strengths. 5) Smith and Jones do not have access to each other's poisons.

I couldn't draw much else with the mouse, nothing more complicated than a lopsided house and a tree, so I would ask him, knowing full well he wasn't the artist in the family, to draw something for me; that day I asked for a dog. He tried his best, but what came up on the canvas was a misshapen thing - a kind of pig-dog hybrid that was so bad it had us laughing for a good while.

Indeed, our most painful and vivid memories are often of experiences in which we were humiliated by or in front of others. Embarrassment can lead to shame and self-loathing. It can diminish our confidence, shake us from our sense of certainty, and cause the kind of repression that expresses itself in all types of neuroses. When we feel embarrassed, we want to avoid others and conceal that of which we are ashamed.

As we entered the AI micro age, which is where we are now, I asked a simple question: If we have access to all the information in the world at our fingertips, what will be the most important skill moving forward? It's going to be asking the right questions, like "Should I do this?" The option will be there to do just about anything, which raises questions about ethics, philosophy, and problem-solving. All of that happens to be the bedrock humanities curriculum.

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli dismissed a muddled theory with this single, scathing line: "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong." It sounds pedantic, but Pauli's point is an important one. Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can't be tested at all. And that distinction is just as relevant when debating on social media today as it was when applied in the field of 20th-century physics.

The original idea was to run an actual D&D campaign over the course of the semester, with students encountering structured philosophical problems along the way-an in-game trolley problem, a famous sorcerer fatally entwined with the body of an innocent townsperson, and so on. I loved the immersive potential of that approach because it seemed like a way to give students a sense of having a personal stake in the matter, even while considering the rather fanciful conditions that arise in philosophical thought experiments.

However, the term 'Anthropocene' has become deeply ingrained in the public imagination and will not be simply erased. And it still has currency, but it needs to be broken loose from entrenched debates that carry unnecessary baggage. The Anthropocene is a prism through which we can examine the multifaceted history of human activities on this planet, and the spectrum of our potential futures.

Some idealists set out to build a new community from scratch. They saw themselves as unusually clear-headed and logical - people determined to build a society based on reason rather than on the accidents of tradition. If there was a better way to do something, they wanted to find it. At first, the experiment went smoothly. They shared work, rotated responsibilities, and debated policy late into the night.

Although the saltmarsh sparrow ( Ammospiza caudacuta) is considered endangered internationally, it's not legally recognised as such in the United States. Because these birds live only in the tidal salt marshes of the US Atlantic coast, this lack of legal recognition limits the support and protection available for their conservation.

Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term "kρίσις" to describe a "turning point"; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like "sieving," "discriminating" and "judging." In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate "sieving." Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.

Academic philosophy, it goes without saying, is increasingly seen as a venerable yet useless relic-a field of human inquiry relevant only at a bygone time, when science (as we know it today) did not yet exist. The scientific, techno-optimist mindset dominant in many circles today-with its emphasis on empirical testability and measurable results-is increasingly seen as the most effective, and efficient, method to address the concerns that have traditionally fallen under the purview of academic philosophy.

Conversion therapy is the discredited and harmful practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity. The therapist in the case (Kaley Chiles) argues that this law is an unconstitutional restriction on her speech: psychotherapy is, on her view, a kind of speech, and thus the state law violates her First Amendment rights. The state responds that psychotherapy is a medical procedure,

My footsteps echo across the floors of a gallery that seems nearly empty of people or art. Yet as I wander the gallery, I am mirrored by swarms of people that seem to flurry across the walls. From behind the glass of orderly, and often rather small, black and white photos, jubilant masses rush towards me arms raised, sometimes alongside grim-faced placard-carrying companions, while in others children play amidst rubble, friends embrace, and couples kiss.

The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. We invite submissions on any aspect of Chinese thought, as well as comparative work that engages Chinese perspectives.The 2026 conference will take place in person at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on April 3-4, 2026.

We collapse uncertainty into a line of meaning. A physician reads symptoms and decides. A parent interprets a child's silence. A writer deletes a hundred sentences to find one that feels true. The key point: Collapse is the work of judgment. It's costly and often can hurt. It means letting go of what could be and accepting the risk of being wrong.

The answer requires what I call wisdom of temporal perspectives in our decision-making. The wisdom of temporal perspectives involves the temporal appraisal of the current situation, where we take into consideration past factors that give rise to the situation and future consequences that may transpire when solving problems and making decisions. It is a form of transformational wisdom that is particularly important in a complex world of challenges today.

What's the big idea? There is no such thing as a calculator for life's decisions. Try as we might to quantify, count, and calculate in search of the "right" choice, that is simply not how wise decision-making happens. Qualitative judgment and consideration of preferences and values are required when identifying the best option before us. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite-read by Barry-below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

Dratch, who wore an all-navy outfit with a small bird-pendant necklace, was exploring Stick Stone & Bone, a West Village boutique that hawks woo-woo wares: gems, jewelry, incense. Nose-ringed clientele browsed quietly; jazzy piano twinkled softly from above. The shop had been recommended by Amy Poehler, Dratch's close friend and podcast guest. On the show, Dratch and her co-host, Irene Bremis, a comedian and Dratch's high-school pal, are regaled by familiar faces' woo-woo tales: Tina Fey's spooky Jersey vacation town, Will Forte's Ouija high jinks, Gloria Steinem on the intuition of the oppressed. Dratch said that Poehler is, generally, "the ultimate skeptic" of woo-woo-ness.

Forgiveness is often offered as a powerful solution, as an agent to not only help you heal from painful events but also allow you to move forward. The general idea is that holding onto anger can make you bitter and hold you back from healing from harm that someone has done to you. But the problem is that there are several serious complications when we try to use forgiveness as a solution.

What does government govern? What, in other words, is government the government of? The answer - at least in the West - has shifted over time. In the age of religion, kings and queens ruled over souls, preparing them for the divine beyond. After the Enlightenment, the soul gave way to the mind as the focus of governance. By the late 18th century, the target had shifted again.

When a life-size skeleton dressed like the Grim Reaper first appeared on a street altar in Tepito, Mexico City, in 2001, many passersby instinctively crossed themselves. The figure was La Santa Muerte - or Holy Death - a female folk saint cloaked in mystery and controversy that had previously been known, if at all, as a figure of domestic devotion: someone they might address a prayer to, but in the privacy of their home.

One of the most prominent visitors of the World's Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. "Sometimes people are saying that God is out there," Titov said. "I was looking around attentively all day but I didn't find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God."

Roughly 136,000 years ago, its ancestors - white-throated rails from Madagascar - flew to Aldabra and found a predator-free paradise; no sharp-toothed prowlers or featherless bipeds with pointy sticks. And so, the rails evolved into flightless versions. Why waste effort and energy on flying when there's no point? Then came a catastrophic flood. The island went underwater. The rails couldn't fly, and they couldn't swim. They went extinct.

Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War.

We all desire to be loved. We only fully flourish when we are loved. Being loved affirms our goodness as human persons. Our search for love shapes so many of our actions and pursuits. Some have even suggested that all of our reasons for action arise from love, and that all of our various emotions and passions are ultimately grounded in love.

The wisdom here isn't about self-deprecation, but rather embracing what Davis et al. (2011) refer to as the "just right view of the self." When we clearly understand both our strengths and weaknesses, we gain a better understanding of the value we bring to our environment as well as where we need additional support. In theory, when we recognize this, neither flattery nor insult should have the power to distort our self-worth.

In the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali begins his discussion on how to practice yoga with the word tapas -and he's not talking about Spanish cuisine! Sometimes tapas is translated as "learning from our suffering," but it basically means "to burn" in the way that you might burn away impurities by heating gold. This is why I often call yoga a form of alchemy.

It will be frustrating or worse when our contributions do not seem to be understood, accepted, or appreciated. We are wise to pay attention to how we are being perceived in personal life (e.g., how an in-law regards us as a parent), in professional life (e.g., how an administrator evaluates a project we created), and in community life (e.g., how family or friends react to a speech we present).

AI products can now be used to support people's decisions. But even when AI's role in doing that type of work is small, you can't be sure whether the professional drove the process or merely wrote a few prompts to do the job. What dissolves in this situation is accountability - the sense that institutions and individuals can answer for what they certify. And this comes at a time when public trust in civic institutions is already fraying.

Think about if you're having a discussion with a mutual friend on a Facebook post instead of at a gathering in someone's house, if you're venting to another friend over text instead of in the pub, or if you're interviewing for a job on a video call instead of in real life. The words you use might all be the same, but there's less to go on overall. Information, here, should be taken very broadly.