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Existential Philosophy
Millions of people have had a near-death experience, and it often leads them to believe in an afterlife. Does this count as good proof?
In pre-War Cambridge, students had to ace an interview with Ludwig Wittgenstein to attend his lectures — Alan Turing passed that test, and went on to create one of his own.
Our intuitive understanding of time is very different from a physicist's understanding of time. How do we reconcile these views?
We need a hypothesis that accounts for both the fine-tuning of physics for life but also the arbitrariness and gratuitous suffering we find in the world.
The history of hell doesn't begin with the Old Testament. Instead, hell took shape in the 2nd century from Mediterranean cultural exchange.
Traditionally, the long history of Japanese thought has not been viewed as “philosophy” — even by Japanese scholars. It’s time for a rethink.
The One Ring has its own agency and sentience — and it opens up a wonderful philosophy of things beyond our comprehension.
A new book envisions an encounter of minds between the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Despite the vast number of planets in the Universe, Earth's specific evolutionary history guarantees that its life forms — including humans — are utterly unique.
The carnival spirit was in full swing when the priests got wasted and made indecent gestures while dressed like pimps.
Descartes broke from the European philosophers who preceded him and devised a new way of considering humanity and the world.
We have become the greatest threat to ourselves and to life on this planet. We need a set of agreed-upon safeguards to preserve our future.
Thinking about the problem of meaning is unsettling because it introduces us to a list of solutions that all feel a bit insane.
John Templeton Foundation
The Universe is grand, awe-inspiring, and greater than we likely imagine. Even astrophysicists get anxious thinking about it, but we cope.
5mins
“All the plausible paths to a really great future, involve the development of machine superintelligence at some point.”
With a finite 13.8 billion years having passed since the Big Bang, there's an edge to what we can see: the cosmic horizon. What's it like?