We collapse uncertainty into a line of meaning. A physician reads symptoms and decides. A parent interprets a child's silence. A writer deletes a hundred sentences to find one that feels true. The key point: Collapse is the work of judgment. It's costly and often can hurt. It means letting go of what could be and accepting the risk of being wrong.
One of the most prominent visitors of the World's Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. "Sometimes people are saying that God is out there," Titov said. "I was looking around attentively all day but I didn't find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God."
Roughly 136,000 years ago, its ancestors - white-throated rails from Madagascar - flew to Aldabra and found a predator-free paradise; no sharp-toothed prowlers or featherless bipeds with pointy sticks. And so, the rails evolved into flightless versions. Why waste effort and energy on flying when there's no point? Then came a catastrophic flood. The island went underwater. The rails couldn't fly, and they couldn't swim. They went extinct.
Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War.
We all desire to be loved. We only fully flourish when we are loved. Being loved affirms our goodness as human persons. Our search for love shapes so many of our actions and pursuits. Some have even suggested that all of our reasons for action arise from love, and that all of our various emotions and passions are ultimately grounded in love.
The wisdom here isn't about self-deprecation, but rather embracing what Davis et al. (2011) refer to as the "just right view of the self." When we clearly understand both our strengths and weaknesses, we gain a better understanding of the value we bring to our environment as well as where we need additional support. In theory, when we recognize this, neither flattery nor insult should have the power to distort our self-worth.
In the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali begins his discussion on how to practice yoga with the word tapas -and he's not talking about Spanish cuisine! Sometimes tapas is translated as "learning from our suffering," but it basically means "to burn" in the way that you might burn away impurities by heating gold. This is why I often call yoga a form of alchemy.
It will be frustrating or worse when our contributions do not seem to be understood, accepted, or appreciated. We are wise to pay attention to how we are being perceived in personal life (e.g., how an in-law regards us as a parent), in professional life (e.g., how an administrator evaluates a project we created), and in community life (e.g., how family or friends react to a speech we present).
On Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 9:00pm Beijing time the Chinese-Greek Philosophy Forum Geju yu Dongjian 格局与洞见 ( Horizons and Insights) will host a lecture by Professor Jana S. Rošker (University of Ljubljana) titled "Zeno of Elea and Hui Shi 惠施 Through the Lens of the Flying Arrow".
'When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.' That landscape was her enduring love and her legacy, painted over and over in vibrant hues, under scudding clouds and pale blue skies.
Names are a big deal in the philosophy of language. Gottlob Frege taught philosophers about sense and reference with "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus." Bertrand Russell used names to demonstrate how the surface form of a sentence can differ radically from its logical form. And Saul Kripke used observations about names to motivate theses in modal metaphysics. Names are a big deal outside of philosophy, too. We don new names to symbolically mark changes in self-identity (due to marriage or religious conversion, etc.).
But as an Indigenous person who studies environmental humanities, this sort of effort, and the debate about it, misses a key ecological perspective. Biologically speaking, it is normal, and even critical, for nature to do more during the brighter months and to do less during the darker ones. Animals go into hibernation, plants into dormancy. Humans are intimately interconnected with, interdependent on, and interrelated to nonhuman beings, rhythms and environments.
Zanker's analysis of the altar captures the tension between such images of nature's plenty and the sense of micromanaged design - a desire by the architect to convey a 'model of perfect order', as he puts it in The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1988). Close to the altar was an obelisk, a trophy of Roman imperial expansion into Egypt. This seems to have acted as a monumental timepiece, or gnomon, which cast shadows over the sundial plate (solarium) where it was positioned.
Recent research suggests that consciousness can be understood as the process of experiencing information through unique filters or "lenses." This ability extends beyond humans to animals, plants, and even bacteria. The Universal Nature of Awareness This lens metaphor helps explain how different organisms perceive reality differently. Just as optical lenses bend light to create images, biological systems filter and focus information to create consciousness.
In the philosophy of Practice Makes Love Easy (PMLE), love is not just a feeling-it's a daily discipline, a creative force, and a communal rhythm. It is with great honor to present Carly Ozard (they/them/she) as the ninth accomplished individual featured in this column. Few embody the ethos of PMLE as fully as Ozard, who is a non-binary entertainer, educator, and activist whose voice carries across stages and communities from San Francisco to New York. Ozard's work is a living testament to love practiced boldly, inclusively, and with deep intention.
Thinking can be both active and passive. We can choose where to direct our attention and use reason to solve problems or consider why things happen. Still, we cannot completely control our stream of thought; feelings and ideas bubble up from influences outside our control. One kind of passive thinking is letting others think for us. Such passive thinking, Kant thought, was not good for anybody.
Slacker does not follow a traditional narrative structure. It follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread linking the individual events. Yet, somehow, it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.
While tarot cards are now commonly associated with fortune-telling and spiritual guidance, they began as a game for the Italian elite. In this short film from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, curators delve into the museum's tarot collection - from rare hand-painted 15th-century decks to contemporary examples - tracing tarot's evolution across ages. Throughout, they highlight the cards' intricate craftsmanship, symbolic systems and links to diverse folklore, mythologies and astrology.
Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field of free will. What are exactly the kind of questions that are worth asking? What different kinds of experiments that can say something about conscious and unconscious decisions can help us be more modest in what we realize we can control, and what we can't? Generally, humans have a sense that they control themselves and sometimes their environment more than they do.
People really like Japanese philosophy. If you ever see a list of "untranslatable words" or "beautiful words from around the world," then you will notice how Japanese ideas are often overrepresented. Whenever I explore a Japanese concept on the Mini Philosophy social media pages - wabi- sabi, mono no aware, ikigai - they outperform almost everything else. Part of this, no doubt, is a kind of exoticism.
Just as an Indian carpet is interwoven with many threads of various colors to produce a perceivable pattern of harmony, Indian writings and religion are interwoven, perhaps in an even more complex way, to produce the pattern we have come to know as Indian philosophy. But for the novice, this pattern can be more than confusing; it can be overwhelming. Actually, one can begin in a systematic way to study and discover the various teachings of Indian philosophy, such as Yoga.
This short 1986 documentary follows the International Youth for Peace and Justice Tour, a programme in which teenagers from then-conflict zones around the world visited and spoke with high-school students across Canada. Capturing the tour's stop in Montreal, the director Premika Ratnam introduces viewers to teens from unstable or war-torn nations of the period - including Northern Ireland, East Timor, Namibia, Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Guatemala - as they recount their experiences. With wisdom often beyond their years, they discuss a range of hardships, from daily indignities and lack of job opportunities to witnessing torture and murder and fearing for their lives.
The phenomenon of evil has always been part of human existence but is particularly pervasive in our present times. By definition, we think of evil as being purely negative, pernicious, vile, vicious, and destructive. A noxious force and tragic existential fact of life that brings only misery, sorrow, and suffering to those accidentally or intentionally exposed to or victimized by it. Which, to some extent, includes each of us. But can the painful and devastating experience of evil and the profound suffering it brings possibly be productive, growth-enhancing, or psychologically and spiritually transformative? Can good come from evil? Can suffering be redeemed?
At first, it sounds like a design problem. Or maybe a customer service one. Add new markets, new systems, new customers, and suddenly the challenge is keeping what was working while trying to understand what the future needs to become. But underneath, it's a question about honesty. What if the kind of growth that stretches empathy and deepens awareness (the kind we expect from people) could guide how organizations grow too?
Two millennia ago, Aristotle distinguished between a life lived in pursuit of pleasure, which brings temporary satisfaction, and a life lived according to reason, virtue, and the pursuit of goals, which leads to true happiness. Therapeutic approaches of today tend to agree with Aristotle that fleeting pleasures aren't enough to make us happy and that a subjective sense of well-being stems largely from the way we live our lives.
What excites you about philosophy? Its application to everything! As an undergraduate, I was able to conduct research with philosophy professors and a philosophy of psychology professor. Now I teach courses on topics such as philosophical engineering and computer science ethics. And because philosophy is the foundational intellectual discipline, I believe it contains all the resources universities need to navigate rapid changes in information technology, political upheaval, social reorganization, etc. By emphasizing deep reading, critical thinking, and embodied ethics,
It is evident to the responding officers that Harvey is experiencing some sort of delusion, and since they cannot calm him down or convince him of his safety, they opt to detain him. The officers can do so, as in the United States, while the Fourteenth Amendment provides some guardrails to involuntary commitment, there is no federal statute regarding detention, and it is up to their discretion to detain him if they believe he could be a threat to himself or others.