ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
A large proportion of the world’s top tourist destinations are the remains of dead empires. A week of sightseeing with my younger children in Italy reminded me of this. The city of Rome was the capital of an empire that at its height stretched from Britannia to Babylonia. The city of Venice once ruled a …
Heraclitus of Ephesus (l. c. 500 BCE) was one of the early Pre-Socratic philosophers who, like the others, sought to identify the First Cause for the creation of the world. He rejected earlier theories such as air and water and claimed that fire was the First Cause as it both created and destroyed. Read more
Ahumble virus, the Dead Sea, oil pipelines, Wonder Woman, a voodoo doll, Escherichia coli, the concept of freedom, monsoons, ‘extinct’ languages, and tectonic plates. All are real. All are active. And, in their own way, these and myriad other nonhuman entities are actors, enrolled in the production of our world. We’re still in the opening paragraph, but …
In answering the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Immanuel Kant in 1784 argued that ‘All that is required for this enlightenment is freedom … namely, the freedom of man to make public use of his reason in all matters.’ In the past several years, this commitment to the emancipatory power of reason, and to the further belief …
Introduction The Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, posits that Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. Introduced in the early 1970s, the idea was …
When we think about some of the most influential and remembered people of the Greek and Roman Empires, most would imagine the likes of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, or an individual with confidence, poise, and sophistication. Read more
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative dialogue whereby participants make assertions about a particular topic, investigate those assertions with questions designed to uncover presuppositions and stimulate critical thinking, and finally come to mutual agreement and understanding about the topic under discussion (though such mutual agreement is not guaranteed or required). Read more
For three years, my workdays began the same way. At 7:30 a.m., I woke up, checked the news, and drove to work at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The routine was easy and predictable, two of the hallmarks of life as a Russian diplomat. Read more
So, you want to make the world a better place. You want your net effect on other people’s lives to be positive, for them to be better off because of your actions. This is a noble impulse but one fraught with knotty questions. One of the thorniest: How do you actually know what the consequences of your …
In order to understand what Hegel was doing in his Logic, we should first look at the circumstances of his life and the situation in Germany at the time. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, just 620 km from Paris. So he was 18 at the time of the storming of the Bastille and …