Pinker vs Nietzsche: Why music is the true basis of language.
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Hegel vs Marx: Ideas change the world not economics.
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Why anthropocentrism is a violent philosophy | Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution, but a single, accidental result of nature’s blind, aimless process. Since evolution has no goal and no favourites, humans are necessarily part of nature, not above it.
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Our current philosophical frameworks are ill-equipped to deal with the future of birth and pregnancy. By clinging to neat definitions, we’ve ignored the messy, real ways people become mothers, fathers, and everything in between.
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What’s the point? Chasing purpose in a world that can’t agree on one.
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We don’t just remember history, we construct it. | Memorials are products of present power structures.
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Blame Descartes for our warped view of consciousness. By putting thought above feeling, we’ve erased the body’s central role in shaping the mind. | Antonio Damasio
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Transhumanists and antinatalists both get humanity wrong. | By rejecting the limits and sufferings that define human life, both movements misunderstand what makes life meaningful in the first place.
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Don’t despair about being a pessimist. Pessimists can change the world too. | Despite the bleakness of human existence, we can find a modest, virtuous, and tranquil life within the limits of what we cannot change.
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“God is not an all-powerful man with a white beard. God is an experience you can have.” | How psychedelics influenced Western thought – from Plato to Nietzsche and beyond.
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Who you are matters more than what happens to you. | While modern ethics obsesses over rules and outcomes, stoicism reminds us that a good life isn’t about maximising pleasure or obeying commands, but about developing a strong character.
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“The self is not a fixed point, but a shifting field of experiences shaped by longing, memory, and narrative” | Why anime is the philosophical medium of our time.
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Alasdair MacIntyre: The man who declared morality a fiction | We can no longer make meaningful moral judgments because we've lost the shared traditions and narratives that gave moral language its depth and coherence.
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When efficiency becomes the ultimate goal, life becomes a damaging checklist and politics a cover for deeper agendas. Not everything worth doing is productive. Sometimes joy, trust, and meaning matter more than getting things done efficiently.
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Chinese philosophy challenges the foundations of reality. | The fundamental structure of reality is not fixed or singular, but a kaleidoscope of partial truths, each offering a legitimate, yet incomplete, perspective shaped by human attachment and context.
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Lions can speak, and we must try to understand them. | Wittgenstein and why our politicians should talk to animals and include them as political actors with voices in a democratic community.
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Rationality alone is not enough to guide human progress or truth. Liberalism must embrace the irrational, the unpredictable, and the messy as essential to a functioning society.
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Russell vs American philosophers and the attack on truth | Truth is found through the ongoing, shared testing of our beliefs in real life. It’s not just about what “works” right now, but about what holds up over time in the tough, resistant reality we must navigate.
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Camus vs Fanon: Why all rebels risk becoming tyrants | Even justified acts of rebellion must be accompanied by regret, especially when they involve violence; otherwise, they risk becoming indistinguishable from the tyranny they seek to overthrow.
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Clarice Lispector’s existential vision is fundamentally posthuman: the moment we construct a self, we also create linear time and begin living toward death. By envisioning her own death, Lispector breaks free from the confines of selfhood and the forward pull of time.
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Our sense that the world is real, stable, and mind-independent – the very bedrock of science, metaphysics, and epistemology – is itself a fragile, evolved psychological state, not an inevitable or purely rational insight.
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Darwin's theory ties all traits to survival, yet conscious experience - Descartes’ one undeniable fact - defies that logic. Denis Noble, Stuart Hameroff, and Antonella Tramacere clash over whether evolution needs consciousness at all.
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Wittgenstein and the paradoxes at the limits of language: Self-referential contradictions arise inevitably when philosophy reaches the limits of language. These contradictions are not flaws but essential features of philosophical thought.
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David Deutsch: The many-worlds interpretation is not just the best, but the only philosophically sound account of quantum mechanics. Rooted in fallible but progressive knowledge, it rejects scepticism and affirms science as our path to grasping the truth.
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Annaka Harris: Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent. | Consciousness is not a byproduct of complex systems like the human brain; instead, Harris suggests that matter and all physical phenomena may instead be appearances within consciousness.
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