ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
We may be all too familiar with roses as a rule, but it remains intriguing to look at a beautiful rose and wonder what forces, or perhaps intelligence, led its stem to be studded with protective thorns that say to the observer, “keep your distance.” There are insects whose form is virtually indistinguishable from twigs …
The term ‘continental philosophy’ covers a plurality of philosophical currents, including German idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory. Accordingly, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Arendt, Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze are all considered continental philosophers. Generally speaking, ‘continental philosophy’ refers to a large set of 19th and 20th-century philosophical traditions and philosophers, mostly from …
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 …
The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics, by Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, Cambridge University Press, 250 pages, $28.99 With The Other Divide, political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan have made a significant contribution to the polarization debate. Wait! What debate? Everyone knows that Americans are more polarized now than at …
William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the …
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 …