ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster” (1). Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks …
Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature …
Dualists in the philosophy of mind emphasize the radical difference between mind and matter. They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain, and some deny that the mind is wholly a product of the brain. This article explores the various ways that dualists attempt to explain this radical difference between the …
A Curtin University-led research team used a supercomputer to simulate how a supercontinent forms. They discovered that because the Earth has been cooling for billions of years, the thickness and strength of the plates under the oceans reduce with time, making it difficult for the next supercontinent to assemble by closing the “young” oceans, such …
Even if the really big finds of archaeology may already belong to the past, experts are all over the world looking for traces of former civilizations and their remains. In the process, small and large things are found every day that help to establish connections and better understand the origins of today’s civilization. Again and …
“Advising billionaires on how to give away their money and encourage them to give more is definitely not where I saw my life going.” That’s William MacAskill (Oxford), quoted in a New York Times article about his influence on the philanthropy of the very wealthy. He adds: “If I can help encourage people who do have enormous …
The Nobel Prize in physics this year has been awarded “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Read more
Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work …
The modeling of dynamic processes is at the forefront of research in numerous branches of science, including political science [1], sociology [2], and social psychology [3]. The aim of modeling a social system is not to reproduce it with its whole complexity, but rather to postulate causal relations which could be next confronted with statistical …
Recent attempts to understand the origin of social fragmentation on the basis of spin models include terms accounting for two social phenomena: homophily—the tendency for people with similar opinions to establish positive relations—and social balance—the tendency for people to establish balanced triadic relations. Spins represent attribute vectors that encode G different opinions of individuals whose …