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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Trump, tariffs, and the lessons to learn from Machiavelli | Why liberal democracies must embrace Machiavellian realism to survive
Geopolitics is focused on the relationship between politics and territory. Through geopolitics we attempt to analyze and predict the actions and decisions of nations, or other forms of political power, by means of their geographical characteristics and location in the world. In a broader sense, geopolitics studies the general relations between countries on a global scale. Here we analyze local events in terms of the bigger, global picture.
To survive in a world dominated by power politics, liberal democracies must embrace a Machiavellian realism, without abandoning their core values, and recognise – as Trump’s rise laid bare – that virtue alone is no match for raw, transactional power.
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Bohr wasn’t the anti-realist he's made out to be. He deliberately withheld a final judgment about the nature of reality because the conceptual tools to fully articulate quantum reality had not yet been developed.
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The purpose of life is not to serve collective utility or conform to moral expectations, but to fully realise the self through creativity and authenticity. For Oscar Wilde, only art for art’s sake can resist the state’s suffocating push for conformity.
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Trump challenges Fukuyama’s idea that history will always progress toward liberal democracy. And while some may call Trump a realist, Fukuyama disagrees: Trump’s actions are reckless and self-defeating, weakening both America’s alliances and its democracy.
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Kant vs. Hume: Why reality isn’t just “out there” | Knowledge isn’t about accessing an independent world but about the conceptual framework that makes both self and reality intelligible in the first place.
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Jealousy can be a virtue too. | When driven by rightful grievance rather than possessiveness, it reflects self-respect and a keen sense of justice, making it not just justified, but morally necessary.
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Radical Conservatives like Dugin want to change our view of reality | How "Putin’s Rasputin" turned Heidegger’s critique of modernity into a weapon against liberalism, redefining history as a clash of civilisations, not individuals.
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Fear of death can paradoxically make us more driven and conscientious, pushing us to be more successful and leave a meaningful legacy. But conscientiousness is a double-edged sword that creates both masterpieces and atrocities, depending on the values that shape it.
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Language shapes reality – neuroscientists and philosophers argue that our sense of self and the world is an altered state of consciousness, built and constrained by the words we use.
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Consciousness, the brain, and our chimeric selves | Your brain might not be entirely your own - research suggests you could be carrying someone else’s DNA, potentially shaping your consciousness and how you experience the world.
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Wittgenstein vs Dawkins: why God is not a scientific hypothesis. | Religion isn’t failed science but a different way of seeing rooted in lived experience, meaning, and emotion, that can’t be captured by empirical analysis.
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The life and philosophy of Peter Singer: Behind the scenes with "The Dangerous Philosopher"
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Tragedy teaches us that history isn’t a battle between good and evil, but a clash of competing truths. | How Trump threatens 2000 years of Western thought.
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The idea of a fixed "now" is an illusion – philosophers and neuroscientists argue that our perception of the present is an ever-shifting construct, shaped by culture, history, and our brain’s survival-driven hallucinations.
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Pain challenges the deep-seated illusion of a mind-body divide, revealing itself as neither purely physical nor purely mental but an emergent phenomenon of our entire being-in-the-world – dismantling Cartesian dualism in the process.
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Donald Hoffman on perception and the limits of scientific theories | Hoffman argues that perception evolved to construct useful fictions rather than reveal objective reality. Critics claim this undermines itself, as evolutionary theory relies on true perceptions.
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