4 Spiritual Exercises in Gratitude and Indulgence

Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning. Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome?

Buddhism offers a toolbox of practices for living well. You have probably heard about breath meditation (ānāpānasmṛti), for example. But have you heard of “changing the peg?” While breath meditation is focused on uniting your conscious mind with an awareness of your own body, changing the peg is focused on altering the process of your thoughts themselves.

In a world increasingly divided by the natural and the unnatural, rediscovering our connection to our environment is vital, writes Peter Kahn.

A child’s sense of curiosity is a wonderful thing – but not one that is always encouraged. It’s time to harness children’s fascination with the big questions of life, through structured teaching of philosophy from a young age.

Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism. What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience...

Is everything predetermined, or is it all random? Or is there something in between that we call free will that defies our attempts to explain it?

There’s nothing like a worldwide pandemic and its incessant media coverage to get you ruminating on the fragility of life. And those thoughts of death triggered by the coronavirus amplify the best and worst in people.

Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre-scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.’

Philosophy can help us live more meaningful lives and build better societies. We just need a framework of philosophy that fits our modern-day problems.

Michael Sandel was 18 years old when he received his first significant lesson in the art of politics. The future philosopher was president of the student body at Palisades high school, California, at a time when Ronald Reagan, then governor of the state, lived in the same town. Never short of confidence, in 1971 Sandel challenged him to a debate in front of 2,400 left-leaning teenagers.

While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question: "How could someone come up with a concept like algebra?"

In the past few years, when far-right nationalists are banned from social media, violent extremists face boycotts, or institutions refuse to give a platform to racists, a faux-outraged moan has gone up: “So much for the tolerant left!” “So much for liberal tolerance!” The complaint became so hackneyed it turned into an already-hackneyed meme.

These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the general public, that the way we normally think of our mental life has been shown by science to be drastically mistaken. While this is true in a very specific and technical sense, consciousness remains arguably the most distinctive evolved feature of humanity, enabling us not only to experience the world, like other animal species do, but to deliberately reflect on our experiences and to change the course of our lives accordingly.

One study found that sitting in a discussion section on the ethics of meat led students to lower their meat consumption.

Biotech and nanotech have a great potential for disruption to every human-made system we have today, including death. Below is a toy example of how immortality would completely change the structure of society, an example so simple it may seem silly, but which illuminates the principles clearly.

Educated people who live in rich countries are far less likely to say belief in God is necessary for good morals, according to a massive new survey of 38,000 people in 34 countries. The survey, released Monday by the Pew Research Center, revealed a gaping "God gap" between relatively rich and poor countries.

Just before the first COVID-19 lockdown started in Melbourne, I ran out and bought an Xbox – “for the kids,” you understand. I’d never had a games console, and I am certainly not the target demographic for Rockstar Games’ work: massive open-world behemoths like the infamous Grand Theft Auto series and 2010’s Red Dead Redemption. So while I knew of the hype around the prequel Red Dead Redemption 2, I was utterly unprepared for the emotional impact it would have on me – and what curious solace I’d find in its evocation of time and loss.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was one of the most prominent Russian novelists of all time. His novels are often surrounded by a gloomy, violent aura and deep, complex characters. Dostoevsky never fails to make the reader ponder and introduce philosophical themes in a subtle, but convincing way. His novel “Notes from the underground” is one of the most distinguished existential fictions in the world.

A new study provides evidence that women’s reliance on intuition and “gut” feelings helps to explain why they tend to report more magical beliefs than men do. The research has been published in the Journal of Research in Personality.