In an 1849 letter to a friend, five years before she began to translate the Ethics, Eliot wrote, “For those who read the very words Spinoza wrote there is the same sort of interest in his style as in the conversation of a person of great capacity who has led a solitary life, and who [...]
Category: Philosophy
Controversial Philosopher Says Man And Machine Will Fuse Into One Being | HuffPost
Peter Sloterdijk is Germany’s most controversial thinker and media theorist. He has dared to challenge long-established divisions in traditional philosophy of body and soul, subject and object, culture and nature. His 1999 lecture on “Regulations for the Human Park,” in which he argued that genetic engineering was a continuation of human striving for self-creation, stirred [...]
What comes first: ideas or words? The paradox of articulation | Aeon Essays
... (a) seemingly contradictory observation is that articulating our thoughts, in the hard cases, is a purposive activity that doesn’t simply consist in producing words mechanically, in a kneejerk way. The words that immediately come out of us when we are struck by our thoughts (eg, ‘How outrageous!’, ‘What a mess!’) might hardly reflect what [...]
The Philosopher and the Detectives: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Enduring Passion for Hardboiled Fiction | CrimeReads
The scene is London; the year, 1941. Ludwig Wittgenstein, likely the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, has taken a hiatus from his Cambridge professorship to do “war work” in a menial position at Guy’s Hospital. By the time he arrives there, in September, the worst of the Blitz is over, but there’s no way [...]
Immersion in fictional worlds allows us to own our dark side | Psyche Ideas
Our liking for fictional villains such as Voldemort tells us something about the dark side of our own personalities — Read on psyche.co/ideas/immersion-in-fictional-worlds-allows-us-to-own-our-dark-side
Philosophy of Humor (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter. It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, [...]
Racism is baked into the structure of dialectical philosophy | Aeon Essays
It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy — Read on aeon.co/essays/racism-is-baked-into-the-structure-of-dialectical-philosophy
Sikhi In The Age Of Western Domination: Gurmat Or Abrahamic Belief? — The Sikh Mindset – Panthic Soch In A Modern World
The Western World has been the dominant civilizational force on the globe for much of the past 500 years, and its hegemonic power is demonstrated in full force through the Sikhs it has been responsible for producing. The erosion of traditional Sikh theological context is evident when speaking with young Sikhs born and brought up [...]
Erowid Alan Watts Vault : The Nature of Consciousness
I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be, because it's too fundamental to give it a title. I'm going to talk about what there is. Now, the first thing, though, that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background about [...]
Ode to a Flower: Richard Feynman’s Famous Monologue on Knowledge and Mystery, Animated – Brain Pickings
Ode to a Flower: Richard Feynman’s Famous Monologue on Knowledge and Mystery, Animated – Brain Pickings — Read on http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/01/ode-to-a-flower-richard-feynman/
