A team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Intel took thousands of conversations from the scummiest communities on Reddit and Gab and used them to develop and train AI to combat hate speech. Finally, r/The_Donald and other online cesspools are doing something useful.

The writings of towering 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell have drawn many great thinkers to the subject. This article discusses his famous rallying cry for philosophy's value.

If you look up “God” in a dictionary, the first entry you will find will be something along the lines of “a being believed to be the infinitely perfect, wise and powerful creator and ruler of the universe.” Certainly, if applied to non-Western contexts, the definition would be puzzling, but in a Western context this is how philosophers have traditionally understood “God.” In fact, this conception of God is sometimes known as the “God of the Philosophers.”

A literature professor at Manchester Metropolitan University recently unearthed a legendary manuscript: a 200-page work titled The Clockwork Condition by A Clockwork Orange’s Anthony Burgess. Don’t get too excited, Droog lovers. Colin Dwyer at NPR reports that Condition is not a sequel to the cult novel, but rather a meditation on the “condition of modern man” that was to be structured similarly to Dante’s Inferno. The manuscript was also something of a cash grab. After the release and success of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of book in 1971, a publisher reached out to Burgess...

Close to the north pole of the moon lies the crater Anaxagoras, named for a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C. The eponym is fitting, as Anaxagoras the man was one of the first people in history to suggest the moon was a rocky body, not all too dissimilar from Earth.

The Slovenian philosopher says he does not defend the old communism, but rather new globalist communitarianism. The new challenges, he says, are ecology, the renewal of the welfare state and the prevention of “digital cognitive warfare”.

In her new book, “Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals,” Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Christine Korsgaard makes the case that humans are not inherently more important than animals and therefore should treat them much better than we do.

What happens when you look at a cucumber? Well, to put it simply, you see a cucumber. You consciously experience the oblong, dark green vegetable in all its glory. But what actually occurs in your eyes and brain to construct this vision? The story starts, as you turn your gaze, with light — light hits the cucumber, some of which is absorbed, and some of which reflects into your cornea. This light passes through your pupil and is focused by your eye's lens onto the retina, a thin, photosensitive tissue that converts light into electrical signals.

A New York Times columnist outlined the ways in which race and "white guilt" are playing a role in the 2020 Democratic primary.

The people of Germany, with their reputation for having an industrial-strength work ethic, may not spring to mind as the happiest or healthiest people around. Yes, Germans are better known for their beer and brats than their wellness rituals. But at the same time, with their unique ways to relax, unplug, enjoy nature, and tap into the wisdom of their rich traditions, Germans have lot to teach the rest of the world about living the good life.

In January of this year, the White House responded to a not-entirely-serious petition to build a Death Star, a huge moon-sized battle station armed with planet-destroying laser cannons depicted in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Friday night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” host Bill Maher asked when Christians in this country swapped Christ’s message of love and tolerance for a philosophy of “F*ck off and die” toward people who aren’t like them. Showing an image of Congressional Republicans captioned “Cheap of faith,” Maher said, “New rule: It’s okay if you don’t want to feed the hungry or heal the sick or house the homeless. Just don’t say you’re doing it for their own good.”

Everything was going great until you showed up. You see me across the crowded room, make your way over, and start talking at me. And you don’t stop...

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” If William Faulkner was writing that line today, he might add, “And it’s taking up far too much of your life.” We’re living in the most technologically advanced moment in history, but for those of us in our 30s, we’re spending more and more of our time looking back, not forward. And the entertainment industry is cashing in, happily catering to our love of stuff that was important to us when we were younger.

THE recent announcement by a team of astronomers that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy has further fueled the speculation, popular even among many distinguished scientists, that the universe is teeming with life.

I had an epiphany that has forced me to rethink why I love living things so much and reexamine what life is, really. For as long as people have studied life they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally accepted definition of life.

How the Revolution, and two thinkers, bequeathed us ‘right’ and ‘left.’

“There was a time when Rebecca, our eldest, was desperate to have a pet,” David Clough told me, when we met at the American Academy of Religion conference, held in Baltimore before Thanksgiving. “And she was in the unhappy position of having a father who had reflected ethically on the question at some length” — a father with misgivings about the human use of animals, even for companionship.

Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California at San Diego, says our hopes, loves and very existence are just elaborate functions of a complicated mass of grey tissue. Accepting that can be hard, but what we know should inspire us, not scare us. Her most recent book is Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain.