Daniel Silvermintz wants us to rediscover the virtue of Socratic ignorance. Ignorance may be bliss, but that doesn’t mean we should celebrate stupidity. Ignorance has never been a good excuse, but it is even less so today, when anyone with a question can simply google an answer. How much more do we expect of our […]
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Ray Boisvert tells us about Camus’ essential ambivalence towards the world. If ever there were a poster child for French meritocracy, it would be Albert Camus. He was not yet two when his father was killed in World War I, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother in a tiny apartment with neither
Camus: Between Yes & No Read More »
Patrick Cannon articulates an alternative anarchism. I would like to present for your consideration two interesting and peculiar versions of anarchism, as articulated by the German-Israeli existentialist and social thinker Martin Buber (1878-1965) and the reclusive Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Buber is a fascinating representative of Jewish left-wing thought, while Tolstoy a famous Christian
Martin Buber & Leo Tolstoy: Two Examples of Spiritual Anarchism Read More »
Stephen Faison cross-examines the idea of a social contract. According to classic social contract theory, originally elaborated by Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century, human beings begin politically unorganised, in what is called a state of nature, and society is created by people either explicitly or tacitly establishing a contract whereby they agree to live
The Social Contract: A License to Steal Read More »
Frank S. Robinson takes issue with Julian Jaynes’ argument about the self. Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius” (The God Delusion, 2006). I first encountered its theories discussed in an article in an ancient
How Old is the Self? Read More »
Willie Thompson tries to see Sartre through the eyes of the person who knew him best. In Erica Jong’s best-selling novel of the seventies, Fear of Flying, two characters amuse themselves by telling a third that they’re Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, their acquaintance being vaguely conscious that these are names he ought to
Sartre’s Image in De Beauvoir’s Memoirs Read More »
John Goff wonders what the real cost of privacy is in the modern world. In recent years, worries about privacy have increased markedly. Many people have become aware that they are the objects of an increasingly intensive, and not necessarily benign, process of commercial and political information gathering. Concerns about the surveillance of our movements
What Price Privacy? Read More »
Mihail Evans studies art to understand politics. The work of Frank Ankersmit on representation and democracy is surprisingly little known even among academics working in political theory. At the end of the 1990s, already one of the most eminent figures globally in the philosophy of history, this professor at the University of Groningen in the
Aesthetic Democracy Read More »
Sam Woolfe says that we’re deluding our selves. In our day-to-day lives, it always appears that there is an I who is thinking, perceiving, and interacting with the world. Even the language we use assumes that there is a self – a distinct conscious entity: when we talk to each other we say, ‘I think…’,
The Illusion of the Self Read More »
Water has puzzled scientists for decades. For the last 30 years or so, they have theorized that when cooled down to a very low temperature like -100C, water might be able to separate into two liquid phases of different densities. Like oil and water, these phases don’t mix and may help explain some of water’s
Using machine learning to better understand how water behaves Read More »