Debates

There is no one right way to move through life. Being the kinds of creatures we are, we encounter difficulty, grief, and excitement. Through all of it, we can shape …
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To a Western European with a vague knowledge of Italian, “Manipur” automatically associates with “mani pulite” (pure hands), the big anti-corruption campaign in the early 1990s that changed the whole …
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The German socialist August Bebel once commented that antisemitism is the “socialism of fools” because the antisemites recognized capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish but who …
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Events and Emergencies

In a recent text, Alain Badiou defines philosophy as “a meditation regarding the existence of truths that result from the event in a given situation of being.”[i] …
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On the first day of my Introduction to Philosophy course, I ask students whether an artificial intelligence can fall in love. Many students believe this to be possible. A sophisticated …
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In the prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt expresses her concerns about the launch of the first man-made satellite—Sputnik—into space. Our excitement about this event “second in importance to …
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The subject of self-consciousness is strewn with intellectual land mines. There is no consensus about what kind of consciousness this is or what it is that we’re conscious of when …
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Since the dawn of the computer age scientists, philosophers, and authors have warned of the day when thinking machines would rival and eventually surpass human intelligence. In the most nightmarish …
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Sometimes I wonder how the last words committed from my hands will eventually read? What will these final words say? Would they be as I imagined it all ending? Or …
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When Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, claimed in the summer of 2022 that AI was “sentient,”[1] thereby heralding the ‘Singularity’ (more on this below),[2] he was roundly denounced as, to …
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