Philosophy

Philosophy

Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.

A pole with numerous traffic lights mounted in different directions creates an illusion of control against a clear sky background.
How to find the right balance between controlling teams and allowing them the agency to make mistakes — and learn from them.
A person in minimal clothing pushes a large clock up a blue hill against a grid background with various numbers and graphs, embodying the diligence reminiscent of the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Oliver Burkeman — author of "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" — tells Big Think about modern life lessons from a 6th-century monk.
Open book with an image of a brain on the left page and a pencil eraser unlearning old marks on the right page.
By unlearning old leadership mindsets, cultures, and assumptions we can move from Industrial Age thinking to Intelligence Age thinking.
Collage with baseball trading cards and photos of people, overlaid with a line graph and titled "The Nightcrawler." The piece seems to be in founder mode, capturing the essence of pioneering moments. Background features a grid pattern.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
A graph depicting projectile motion with displacement on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. The projectile's trajectory forms a perfect parabola, with initial velocity u and angle θ clearly indicated.
Taught in every introductory physics class for centuries, the parabola is only an imperfect approximation for the true path of a projectile.
Two men in profile face each other. One points a finger at the other, who remains still, poised to embrace counterarguments. The image features a blue color overlay.
There's value to be found in the arguments that make you uncomfortable — especially in a culture that has trained us to avoid them.
A historical timeline featuring notable figures from 1400 to present, including scientists, writers, politicians, and artists. The timeline is categorized by different historical eras.
"The Big Map of Who Lived When" plots the lifespans of historical figures — from Eminem all the way back to Genghis Khan.
A person lies in bed reading a book, wearing a white blouse, in a painting with soft, muted colors.
With the right prompts, large language models can produce quality writing — and make us question the limits of human creativity.
Portrait of an older man with a beard wearing a hat, depicted in purple tones, with scientific and alchemical symbols in the background, capturing the essence of a truth machine.
Why human attempts to mechanize logic keep breaking down.
A montage of famous philosophers’ portraits next to a large question mark on the right, intersected by a horizontal arrow.
Philosophy cures no disease and invents nothing new. What's even the point?
zero gravity flight stephen hawking
The mass that gravitates and the mass that resists motion are, somehow, the same mass. But even Einstein didn't know why this is so.
A storefront with signs for psychic telepathy readings and a phone number. Two white plastic chairs are placed in front. The storefront is pink with a black awning and a large hand sign advertising $10 readings.
Thinking of a number between one and ten? Here's how predictable human responses create the illusion of telepathy.
Collage featuring a microchip, an illustration of an armored figure, and text: "The NIGHTCRAWLER." Background includes blue grids and binary code, invoking the power of a digital god.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Close-up view of a translucent, flatfish-like biohybrid organism with a thin body and short, spiky fins suspended in clear liquid against a plain background.
As creatures and machines meld together in increasingly advanced forms, ethicists are starting to take note.
A silhouette of a person using a metal detector merges seamlessly with a large, centered image of JFK's face against a gradient blue background, symbolizing leadership and discovery.
Most leaders get the psychology of human motivation all wrong — here’s how a presidential encounter with a leaf-sweeper puts it right.
Abstract image featuring a blue-toned sphere with grid patterns above an orange-toned depiction of a cyclist amidst technical drawings, evoking the principle of golden marginal gains.
For extraordinary long-term success in business we can look to insights from British Olympic cycling, Roger Federer and neuroeconomics.
Comparison of weight on Earth and Mars for a 1 kg mass. On Earth: gravity = 9.81 m/s², weight = 9.81 N. On Mars: gravity = 3.72 m/s², weight = 3.72 N; demonstrating that weight and mass are not the same across different planets due to varying gravitational forces.
Here on Earth, we commonly use terms like weight (in pounds) and mass (in kilograms) as though they're interchangeable. They're not.
A black and white image of a curled fern leaf is centered on a black background with faint, star-like specks, capturing an ethereal beauty reminiscent of Sara Walker's scientific explorations.
In "Life As No One Knows It," Sara Imari Walker explains why the key distinction between life and other kinds of "things" is how life uses information.
A man sits at a control panel with knobs and buttons, wearing a headset, looking at a screen displaying abstract, distorted wavy patterns—the antidote for leaders in navigating complex data.
We can address the misalignment between the current leadership reality and traditional leadership practices with a simple formula.