Debates

Algorithms are emergent phenomena. The word is a Latinized version of Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi’s name, who, in 830 AD, authored The Book of Calculation by Completion and Balancing. Contrary …
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Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence are often hailed as the royal road to mastery. What rarely gets mentioned afterwards, however, is that this is an iterative …
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Here is an open-ended question, a genuine question to which I do not have an answer: can novels about–or set against the backdrop of–ecological catastrophe do anything? And by “do …
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A strange thing happened to me over these past few days. On Friday, December 20 the website of Spectator USA published my comment on the thin line between Zionism and …
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Something is happening to authority these days. In politics, a shift from legal, procedural authority to charismatic, personal authority is discernible, epitomised by Trump, Johnson, and others. Along similar lines, …
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A paradoxical consequence of globalization in the realm of theory is that it has reconfirmed the hollowing out and final exhaustion of the idea of progress. Indeed, this idea had …
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H: What to make of the homophobia of our predecessors? We have with us today a man known for his love for the human heart, and yet whose record of …
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I was an academic philosopher for over twenty years. I published in journals that were indexed but had no readers, advised my students to be rigorous rather than creative, and furiously …
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In the appendix to an article recently published on The Philosophical Salon website, Slavoj Žižek offers a response to the accusations of racism, repetition, reactionaryism and charlatanism that I made …
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Our increasing left-right polarization has a not so unintended effect: it puts more and more pressure on each of us to identify one way or the other, and then, within …
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