In many countries around the world, people are living longer. At the same time birth rates are declining—sometimes rapidly. The result? More old people, fewer young people. Combine that with the world’s highest average life expectancy, and the result is a population that’s rapidly shrinking and rapidly aging. Now that’s dangerous demographics.
They say that the Big Bang gave birth to the entire universe. So you might think that the Big Bang must have been one hell of an explosion. But technically speaking, the Big Bang wasn’t actually an explosion at all. It couldn’t have been.
Music is an amazing thing. It can move us to its groove and or make us cringe. It can lift us up or bring us down. But exactly how does music work its magic on the mind? What separates good music from bad? And why do different people react so differently to the very same music?
There’s a long tradition in philosophy of thinking that we actually know ourselves quite well. Descartes, who has a reasonable claim to be the founder of this tradition, apparently thought that we had infallible and complete knowledge of everything going on in our minds. And he is certainly not the only philosopher to think that.
This week we’re staying up and thinking about Sleep. We spend so much of our lives asleep, but we philosophers have had very little to say about it. Maybe that’s becayse Philosophy is mostly about things we’re conscious of — our experiences, our choices, our beliefs. We’re mostly NOT conscious when we sleep, so you might wonder who cares, really.
This week, our topic is Affirmative Action, We thought we’d focus on the question…
Altruists are people willing to do good things for others at a cost to…
Modern science tells us there are no souls and nothing transcendent. There’s only dumb matter and energy, swirling aimlessly through the void. We humans are nothing but temporary arrangements of such matter – gone and forgotten in the blink of the cosmic eye! But what, then, is the point of it all? What, then, is the meaning of human life? That’s the question we’re grappling with today.
Everybody knows that the US has a long and sorry history when it comes to racial injustice. It also has a long history of privileging the needs, concerns and narratives of white people over those of people of color. But how exactly are white privilege and racial injustice related? That’s our question for this week.
This week our topic is freedom and free markets. We want to explore the extent to which these two things are or perhaps are not mutually dependent on each other. You might think that the answer is obvious, that freedom and free markets necessarily go together hand in glove. Clearly, free markets would not be possible without a great deal individual freedom – particularly the freedom to make contracts.
Questions about the nature of the self are questions of metaphysics. When we ask such questions we want to know what exactly a self is and what distinguishes one self from another. On the other hand, when we talk self-presentation, we seem to be talking psychology or politics or marketing. Self-presentation has to do with how people present themselves to others.
Here is a conjecure. We are by now deep into a new phase of the so-called…
I don’t think that the prospect of death saps life of meaning. People dread death, to be sure, especially a premature death. But that does not mean that they want to live forever. But dreading death is consistent with living with purpose and determination, even in the face of death.
Plato’s Symposium is by turns hilarious, emotionally resonant, and always philosophically deep. It’s a fun and inspiring read. If you haven’t ever read it, you really should. It certainly inspired Leonard Bernstein., who apparently read it repeatedly. Bravely, Bernstein sets out to reproduce in music something of both the philosophical content and literary structure of the Symposium.
A few thoughts about so-called cultures of victimhood and whether it’s a new, old, or…
There can be no denying that whistleblowers may sometimes have the potential to do us all a great service. Whistleblowers are willing to stand up, sometimes at great cost to themselves, and shine the light of truth into the dark corners where governments and corporations operate in secret.