Category: readings

Here it is, your weekly rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

Pandemic stories in the news: something to laugh about. (Skeptical Inquirer)

What the pandemic tells us about personal identity. (New Statesman)

Are there laws of history? Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right? (Aeon)

Antisthenes and the Cynics: how to live a pure and honest life. (Ancient Origins)

Did Galileo truly say, ‘And yet it moves’? A modern detective story. An astrophysicist traces genealogy and art history to discover the origin of the famous motto. (Scientific American)

Here it is, your weekly rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

What humans could be. As psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “Perhaps human nature has been sold short.” (Scientific American)

SpaceX and the ethics of space travel. (Prindle Post)

Who cheats more? The demographics of infidelity in America. (Institute for Family Studies)

Rich people more likely to lie, cheat, study suggests. (Live Science)

How science fails. For the émigré philosopher Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is theoretically and experimentally progressive. [From my friend Jim Baggott, highly recommended.] (Aeon)

Should you take Wolfram’s physics seriously? [Probably not, but it’s fun to think about it.] (Medium)

Stop reading self-help books: the incredible power of novels. [Don’t let the entirely out of place encomium of Elon Musk at the beginning of the article turn you off.] (JotForm)

Here it is, your weekly rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

Why your brain is not a computer. For decades it has been the dominant metaphor in neuroscience. But could this idea have been leading us astray all along? (Guardian)

What Thucydides can teach us. Ancient reflections on a time of plague. (Public Seminar)

The pandemic isn’t a Black Swan but a portent of a more fragile global system. [Even Nassim Taleb is right, occasionally…] (New Yorker)

The Buzz Aldrin fallacy. [It’s a thing.] (Medium)

What Sci Phi is all about: treating science fiction as philosophy. (Sci Phi Journal)

Intellectual alchemists. [On Umberto Eco and Emmanuel Carrère] (Public Books)

Five contemporary philosophies from the Eastern World. (Medium)

Here it is, your weekly rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

How to practice ‘Hansei,’ the Japanese art of self-criticism. After living in Japan, I realized there may be danger in the American tendency to over-celebrate every victory. (Medium)

What students gain from learning ethics in school. (KQED)

Ancient trolling — The paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. How Zeno of Elea played Aristotle, and then the rest of the world. (Medium)

Making sense of the science and philosophy of ‘Devs’. The Hulu show poses questions related to quantum physics and existentialism. How good of a job does it do? And what kind of closure will next week’s finale bring? (The Ringer)

Does the pandemic have a purpose? Only if we give it one. The coronavirus is neither good nor bad. It wants only to reproduce. [Somewhat obvious premise here, but interesting discussion nevertheless.] (New York Times)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe. The pandemic is putting profound philosophical questions to the test. (Bloomberg)

A strange paradox: the better we manage to contain the coronavirus pandemic, the less we will learn from it. [By my friend and collaborator, Maarten Boudry] (The Conversation)

Does time really flow? New clues come from a century-old approach to math. (Quanta Magazine)

The attraction of apocalypse. The philosophical roots of our fascination with catastrophe. (Institute of Arts and Ideas)

The scholar’s vocation. A century ago, Max Weber both diagnosed the ills of the corporatised, modern university, and pointed out the path beyond it. (Aeon)

Coronavirus: this is not a plague. The metaphor obscures clear thinking. [Actually, I disagree with the author, but good read nevertheless.] (American Scholar)

The pandemic is not a natural disaster. The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. [Perfect counter to the article just above] (New Yorker)

It’s the math, stupid. The real pandemic starts the day lockdown ends. (Center for Inquiry)

Ovid on the therapist’s couch. Other writers go to a shrink. Ovid wrote the Heroides. (Medium)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

The Puzzles of Thermopylae. (History Today)

How Stoicism can make you Invulnerable during COVID-19. [Despite the hype in the title, a good article by a serious writer.] (Medium)

Giorgio Agamben’s coronavirus cluelessness. The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

The Golden Rule in Stoicism. How Stoic philosophy teaches us to treat others. (Medium)

There is no such thing as “boosting” the immune system. Except through vaccines, of course. (Science Based Medicine)

To hell with hell: Bart Ehrman debunks the Christian belief in perpetual torment. (Spectator)

Coronavirus has not suspended politics – it has revealed the nature of power. (Guardian)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Is ‘race’ modern? To counter racism, scholars must trace the idea of ‘race’ to its origins, but asking the right questions is half the battle. (Aeon)

Odysseus and You. How you can use the hero’s journey to help you in everyday life. (Medium)

Plagues follow bad leadership in ancient Greek tales. (The Conversation)

Nature is Not Mathematical. [No shit, pace Max Tegmark.] (Medium)

Philosopher in Italian coronavirus lockdown on how to think positively about isolation. (The Conversation)

Ethicists agree on who gets treated first when hospitals are overwhelmed by coronavirus. (Quartz)

At the Margins. [Though the author apparently is unaware that one can annotate e-books as well as physical ones.] (National Review)