It may be the case that war is sometimes the best among bad options. But if we must go to war, we should approach it with the gravity and humility that comes with acknowledging that it’s our fellow creatures that we’re going to war with.
Descartes had no way of knowing that he was inaugurating something that would be taught as “modern philosophy” four centuries later. In some ways, the Meditations presents a deliberate departure from what came before. In other ways, it feels Medieval.
There’s a prejudice that I find all too frequently in the empirical sciences. The history of philosophy, on this view, is a history of better or worse guesses about the world that await scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. It’s only when we reach scientific maturity that we confirm the truths that philosophers can only guess at.
Are fictional characters the kinds of beings toward whom one can have moral obligations? I think there’s a special way in which authors can betray their characters.
On Heidegger’s account, our primary mode of encounter with the world is what he calls care. It’s because, in some deep way, my being-in-the-world matters to me that the world takes the shape that it does at all.
If you’ve recently encountered zombies and ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and swamp creatures, you may have been out on the streets with trick-or-treaters. Or maybe you were in a philosophy seminar.
LLMs are Plato’s worst nightmare. All the dangers he perceives in the written word take on monstrous new form in algorithms that churn out oceans of text, arranging fine-seeming phrases that not only lack any genuine commitment to the truth but that don’t even have a conception of reality to which they might try to be faithful.
You’re probably familiar with the saying the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave die only once. It sounds great but I think there’s something to be said for dying a thousand deaths. The imaginative person lives a thousand lives and the unimaginative only one.
While pre-Avicennan philosophy was largely commentary on Aristotle, post-Avicennan philosophy often took Avicenna himself to be the central figure of philosophy with whom one had to engage, either in agreement or disagreement.
Seeing myself from a physiological point of view deepens my sense of what it means to be a human animal and how my mind is entangled with complex processes that lie deep beneath the level of conscious awareness.