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.”

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.

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.

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?"

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.

Imagine you are at a child’s funeral. The child is yours. The air is numb with silence. An ache so deep you can barely breathe moves through you, until it bursts and you cry out loud. Somebody passes a tissue; another rests his hand on your shoulder. In time, your eyes run out of tears. But now there is a hole in your heart in the shape of a child, and it feels like it will never heal. Maybe it shouldn’t, you think to yourself. You lost a child. This stays with you. It’s supposed to stay with you. How should we grieve when someone close to us dies? Should we wail and gnash our teeth? Should we swallow our pain?

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 a secretive school in China's capital rows of students face a giant video projection of Xi Jinping, making careful notes on the lecture on their leader's guiding principles. Sitting in red-covered chairs in a school dotted with statues of late Chinese leaders, being groomed.

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 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.

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

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.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett is not worried about a catastrophic singularity event — but that doesn’t mean he’s not worried. This article outlines what he considers to be the real, practical dangers of artificial intelligence.

There is a lot of advice on making and keeping New Year’s resolutions. A lot of it is conflicting. Some say resolutions made at the turn of the year could work, some say they’re doomed to fail. Some say we should aim for small changes in our lives, one at a time, others that we should aim for ambitious all-encompassing change.

Several years ago, I climbed Mt. Washington in Nevada to see the oldest complex life forms on Earth. Typically found at elevations higher than 3,000 meters, bristlecone pine trees can live for as long as five millennia. They do so by growing very slowly in arid environments that are too harsh for most other life forms.