Tag Archives: Philosophy

The Gospel According to Spiritism

The Gospel According to Spiritism

hypocrisy and the illusion of forms; in other words, for having combated religious prejudices. Like Jesus, who was accused by the Pharisees of corrupting the people with his teachings, Socrates was also accused by the Pharisees of his time – since they have always existed in all epochs – for corrupting the youth by proclaiming […]

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The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

The Persuaders At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

n June 2014, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva arrived in the United States on a clandestine mission. Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was known to work on behalf of Russian intelligence. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was […]

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Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Life Is Hard How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

This book was conceived before the Covid-19 pandemic. It was written in a fugue of concentration over eighteen months, starting in the summer of 2020, as the world fell apart around me. I’m a philosopher who writes about the question of how to live, and the trials of life had never seemed more urgent. I […]

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Meditations: A New Translation

Meditations A New Translation

Marcus Aurelius is said to have been fond of quoting Plato’s dictum, and those who have written about him have rarely been able to resist applying it to Marcus himself. And indeed, if we seek Plato’s philosopher-king in the flesh we could hardly do better than Marcus, the ruler of the Roman Empire for almost […]

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Science Ideated: The Fall Of Matter And The Contours Of The Next Mainstream Scientific Worldview

Science Ideated The Fall Of Matter And The Contours Of The Next Mainstream Scientific Worldview

The story of how science and metaphysical materialism became seemingly intertwined is a curious one. Back in the seventeenth century, when science as we know it today took its first steps, scientists based their entire work on—what else?—perceptual experience: the things and phenomena they could see, touch, smell, taste or hear around them. That starting […]

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The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

The Botany of Desire A Plants-Eye View of the World

The seeds of this book were first planted in my garden—while I was planting seeds, as a matter of fact. Sowing seed is pleasant, desultory, not terribly challenging work; there’s plenty of space left over for thinking about other things while you’re doing it. On this particular May afternoon, I happened to be sowing rows […]

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Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law

On June 26, 1659, a representative from five towns in a province of northern Italy initiated legal proceedings against caterpillars. The local specimens, went the complaint, were trespassing and pilfering from people’s gardens and orchards. A summons was issued and five copies made and nailed to trees in forests adjacent to each town. The caterpillars […]

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Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Starry Messenger Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Starry Messenger is a wake-up call to civilization. People no longer know who or what to trust. We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. […]

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Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

Science Fictions How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) January 31, 2011 was the day the world found out that undergraduate students have psychic powers. A new scientific paper had hit the headlines: a set of laboratory […]

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When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. —T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality” I FLIPPED THROUGH THE CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the […]

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What We Owe the Future

What We Owe the Future

Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived.1 Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa.2 After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that […]

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Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass

Elusive How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass

To many, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva is synonymous with Peter Higgs, the physicist after whom the particle accelerator’s primary target—the Higgs boson—is named. But what is the Higgs boson, and why is it so singular to have been dubbed in media headlines the God Particle? And not least, who is […]

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