ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
The world has changed fundamentally, according to the author Malcolm Gladwell, from one in which problems are puzzles to one in which they are, instead, mysteries. Using terminology developed by an intelligence official, Gregory Treverton, Gladwell said this distinction often centres on the amount of information available. In the past it was often about having …
The following are some excerpts from multinational astronauts’ expressions of their impressions while in space which are quite right. “The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. [On] The third or fourth day we all pointed to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one earth.” They, then …
Defining what entails a meaningful life has preoccupied philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch. Surveying centuries of thoughtful chin-tugging about the human condition, Kieran Setiya identifies a broad trend: “an affinity with ‘the power of positive thinking’ that implores us not to dwell on trials and tribulations but to …
The starting point of making permanent and lasting changes in your life begins with understanding the difference between “positive” thinking, “negative” thinking, and “right” thinking. Read more
Friction, a philosophy channel featuring interviews of professional philosophers, recently released a supercut of three dozen thinkers answering the question “What is the value of philosophy?” Watch the Video
Along California’s picturesque coastline, archaeologists meticulously dig away at the sprawling sands. Soon enough, they hit something. And as the team exhumes the lost relic, it becomes clear that their find is not merely a cast-off from the ocean, nor does it fit in with the state’s history. Instead, the 300 pound artifact seems to …
As recently as just a few decades ago, the interconnected web of experiences, thoughts and emotions known as a ‘stream of consciousness’ was widely believed to belong to humans alone. A still-accumulating body of evidence, however, strongly indicates that consciousness is far from unique to us. Rather, according to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which …
The relationship between mathematics and morality is easy to think about but hard to understand. Suppose Jane sees five people drowning on one side of a lake and one person drowning on the other side. There are life-preservers on both sides of the lake. She can either save the five or the one, but not …
Suppose that you’re talking with a couple of friends about whether one survives biological death. Your view is that humans are purely physical creatures, which means that there is no non-physical soul or any other part of us that is capable of surviving the death of our physical bodies. As you see it, when someone’s …
Today everyone talks geopolitics. The idea is infectious. It appears to come from nowhere. Twenty years ago, the term was exotic, and the meaning behind it quaint. The world was different then. In 2002, America Unrivaled – a book edited by my Princeton colleague, G John Ikenberry, the foremost exponent of the idea of liberal internationalism – asked why …