Pull up the Wikipedia page for Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love,” the 1984 single now known for re-popularizing the genre of Japanese “city pop.” Then click the first of its links (not r...
It pays to think intelligently about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale professor Shelly Kagan does just that, taking a rich, philosophical look at death. Here’s how the course des...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/09/death-a-free-online-philosophy-course-from-yale-helps.html
A vague sense of disquiet settled over Europe in the period between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of militant ultranationalism mingled with jingoist populism, authoritarian leade...
Photo by Tamiko Thiel via Wikimedia Commons How can we know whether a claim someone makes is scientific or not? The question is of the utmost consequence, as we are surrounded on all sides by cla...
In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursula K. Le Guin quotes a London Times Literary Supplement column by a “J.C.,” who satirically proposes the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “...
Karl Marx was a German philosopher-historian (with a few other pursuits besides) who wrote in pursuit of an understanding of industrial society as he knew it in the nineteenth century and what it...
In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”: It was senseless to try to ...
Back in 2016, New York City staged a month-long festival celebrating Albert Camus’ historic visit to NYC in 1946. One event in the festival featured actor Viggo Mortensen giving a reading of...
If we ask which philosophy professor has made the greatest impact in this decade, there’s a solid case to be made for the late Michael Sugrue. Yet in the nearly four-decade-long career that fol...
“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity,” wrote the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, describing the scene leading up to the prominent Holocaust-organizer’s execution. Aft...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/05/hannah-arendt-explains-the-rise-of-totalitarian-regimes.html
Even if you can name only one ancient Greek, you can name Plato. You can also probably say at least a little about him, if only some of the things humanity has known since antiquity. Until recent...
A week ago, Big Think released this video featuring philosopher Daniel Dennett talking about the four biggest ideas in philosophy. Today, we learned that he passed away at age 82. The New York Ti...
Fallacies—notes Purdue’s Writing Lab—“are common errors in reasoning that will undermine the logic of your argument. Fallacies can be either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points, a...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/67-logical-fallacies-explained-in-11-minutes.html
Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, th...
The word sophisticated may sound like praise today, but it originated as more of an accusation. Trace its etymology back far enough and you’ll encounter the sophists, itinerant lecturers in anc...