Existing is merely the thought of a memory that encapsulates the belief that we exist. One of the greatest misconceptions we are fooled into believing is that objects and specific arrangements alike have substantial meaning. It is easy to imagine the concept of an empty painting, but a painting of a flower becomes a concept to which a subject belongs. The subject is the flower and cannot — unlike the painting – exist without the other.

Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump's characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren't all criminals, he said. "What about those who have come here for reasons of need?"

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

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.”

“Truth always rests with the minority,” the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his diary in 1846 as he contemplated the individual vs. the crowd and why we conform, “because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”

Contrary to popular belief, not all philosophers are nerds. Nor are all nerds philosophers. I am living proof of that, since I was a nerd long before I was a philosopher. I played Dungeons & Dragons, I got good grades, I edited the school newspaper and was on the debate team. Imagine one of the kids from Stranger Things, but not heroic.

With this quote, a group of philosophers and scientists (Laplane et al. 2019) recently opened a joined article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in which they were arguing that scientists are wrong to think that philosophy has no role to play in science. To the contrary, they are outlining “Why science needs philosophy”, inspiring the very creation of this blog.

The moment Solomon lost his faith, he was standing on the D train, swaying back and forth with its movement as if in prayer. But it wasn’t a prayer book that the young law student was reading – he had already been to synagogue, where he had wrapped himself in the leather thongs that bound him to Orthodox Judaism, laying phylacteries and reciting the prayers three times daily.

This weekend, French cultural institutes are sponsoring free intellectual rave parties in 65 cities across five continents. The Night of Philosophy and Ideas (La Nuit de la Philosophie et des Idées), which started as a small gathering among intellectuals in Paris in 2012, has become a global festival devoted to deep thinking.

You wander through life as if half-awake, time passing by. Activities you used to enjoy are now trite, exhausting, and empty of meaning. You feel alienated from others, who now seem far away, belonging to an inaccessible, alternate world where happiness is still possible. You are pushed further into the dark, hateful place inside yourself, where your thoughts– abusive, apathetic, and pessimistic– swirl relentlessly: I hate myself, it’s all pointless, I want to die. From where you are, there seems to be no hope, no relief, no escape. You are depressed.

Buddhist teachings often speak about the concept of self and no-self. It can be a challenge to understand but is fundamental to spiritual practice.

Philosophy is a profoundly interesting subject. Often many people have little to no understanding of what the subject actually is, and don’t realise how influential it has been on numerous aspects of their lives. Ever come across the question “if a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well that annoyingly difficult question was sprung out of the philosophical notion of Idealism.

The influential Austrian-born thinker elucidates his concept of falsifiability, which holds that scientific theories can never be proven true, only demonstrated to be false

Consider two familiar moments at a family reunion. Our host, Uncle Bill, is taking pride in his barbequing skills. But his niece Becky says that she now refuses to eat meat. A groan goes round the table; the family mostly think of this as an annoying picky preference. But if it were viewed as a moral position rather than personal preference – as they might if instead Becky were avoiding meat on religious grounds – it would usually receive a very different reaction.

“Fascism” is a word that gets tossed around pretty loosely these days, usually as an epithet to discredit someone else’s politics. One consequence is that no one really knows what the term means anymore. Liberals see fascism as the culmination of conservative thinking: an authoritarian, nationalist, and racist system of government organized around corporate power. For conservatives, fascism is totalitarianism masquerading as the nanny state.

Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of freedom has become dangerous

There is no self, no 'I', only a flickering illusion. So claim many neuroscientists and philosophers. Yet for the rest of us, the denial of the self feels like a bitter pill to swallow. Is the self a fantasy? Or is it essential to our being and consciousness?

The fallacy fallacy is a logical fallacy which occurs when someone assumes that if an argument contains a logical fallacy, then its conclusion must necessarily be wrong. For example, consider a situation where someone claims that a certain medical treatment is preferable to an alternative simply because it’s perceived as more “natural”, and someone else points out that this reasoning is fallacious, since what matters is whether the new treatment is better in practice, and not whether it’s more natural.

Bullshit. By David Egan.

Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

by Thomas R. Wells Suppose a company wants to fill a job. They would advertise it together with the requirements for any successful candidate. HR would screen out all the applicants not good enough to do the job and everyone e Perhaps you…

What is boredom? What does it mean to have nothing to do? For many of us, the feeling of boredom is associated with being young, newspapers and magazines carry stories about the importance of boredom to stimulate creativity – the rise of the smart phone is, apparently, a threat to us all (although I am sure they said that about television as well…). But what happens when boredom turns into stagnation? When life stretches out behind, and ahead, with few opportunities to progress, gain experiences or make choices? What happens when you have served decades in prison?

Are insects ‘philosophical zombies’ with no inner life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise. By Lars Chittka, Catherine Wilson.

Three academics are launching a new journal in which arguments can be made anonymously. But is separating ideas from their authors the best way forward? Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina, and he works in a large, dark oak-panelled, and not very warm study in Corpus Christi college. It’s a room with an illustrious past.

We think creativity is a uniquely mysterious force. But with Google's Magenta producing musical symphonies, some fear AI threatens to make the imagination redundant. Is human creativity no more than mechanics? Will AI transform and enrich the human experience? Can robots be creative? Or is there something strange about creative thought that separates humans and machines?

In the current political climate of populism and xenophobia, it is tempting to simply close the door and withdraw from public affairs. Indeed, there is a pervading sense that there is no alternative to our polarised politics, neoliberal capitalism and corruption. Pleas for solidarity among nation-states seem to be easily overshadowed by resentment towards foreigners and nostalgia for lost national glory. And yet, it is precisely such retreat into the private realm that Hannah Arendt warned against during the 20th century.

‘I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection.

How my suburban-hewn world-view was flipped on its head. By Jesse Bering.

Our collective overuse and misuse of antibiotics is accelerating resistance to these universal drugs, leaving people increasingly vulnerable to infections that can no longer be treated. This applies not only to the use of antibiotics in human medicine, but also in animal industries. Antibiotic resistance is an example of a collective action problem. These are problems where what is individually rational leads to a collectively undesirable outcome.

We can wonder about what others are thinking or feeling without ever hearing them say a word. My toddler holds an empty ice cream cone, looking despondently at a melting ball of goo on the ground. It is obvious that she is sad she lost her treat. An orangutan brushes his head with a leaf, then hands the leaf to a human caregiver.

For this exercise to work, we need to establish a couple of ground rules. First, drop your logic defense. That’s the exercise. Then, consider that everything that the mind could possibly imagine … has indeed occurred. If time and space are one, we will one day be able to revisit the realms of what we call our “imagination.”

Can Stoicism teach us how to live? A lot of people seem to think so. They identify as “modern Stoics,” a movement that has gained traction over the past two decades, with thousands of members now congregating online and off to practice a self-help version of the philosophical life. They include athletes, military officers, CEOs, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and writers like The New Yorker’s Elif Batuman, who described in a 2016 feature for the magazine how the Stoic philosopher Epictetus helped her cope with a long-distance relationship and sneaky taxi drivers in Turkey.

On this special Losar episode of the Wisdom Podcast, host Daniel Aitken travels to Kathmandu to speak with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, world-renowned teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and founder of the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal. In this special teaching, Rinpoche shares his past life memories and talks about his own experiences with the continuity of…

The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher" – at the entrance to the New York City subway at 57th and 8th – were perhaps random but inevitable.

In retrospect, yes. I was always questioning things, and had a very keen sense of justice and injustice. I would never let an argument drop, and was generally quite annoying. My parents certainly weren’t surprised that I became a philosopher.