What matters in life? Will Wilkinson wrote wrote a nice Big Think post on Friday quoting some recent psychological research and suggesting the answer is “memorable social experience”: A number […]
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Last Friday, I posted a piece in The Stone at The New York Times suggesting the work of philosopher John Rawls as an intellectual touchstone for the Occupy Wall Street […]
Americans must choose the middle path, away from the fundamentalist positions on both the right and the left, argues a Washington think tank.
The death of any given person is just a lack of connectedness to future experiences.
“The owl of Minerva,” Hegel wrote, “takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” A year ago I launched Praxis as a forum for thinking reflectively about […]
Enjoy the inauguration of Barack Obama, Democrats: it may be the last opportunity to cheer a president from your party for quite a while.
The best case against drone warfare as it is being waged lies in the fact that the campaign is being conducted in secret, shrouded from public view, unguided by any clear standards and immune from oversight.
Following on the heels of the Pussy Riot verdicts in Moscow, about a dozen women from the feminist group Code Pink dressed up in vagina costumes outside the Republican National […]
Happiness is not an unalloyed good, Kant says. Without the correct character and orientation, without a sense of duty, happiness is just an animalistic state of mind.
In the avalanche of analysis and speculation about Chief Justice Roberts’ stunning decision to side with the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to uphold Obama’s healthcare law, one strain paints Roberts […]
Who could have predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts would break with the conservative block on the Supreme Court and write the majority opinion upholding the individual mandate, one of […]
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, […]
The United States of America murdered an innocent man. But this is not the main reason we should be against capital punishment. Carlos DeLuna was put to death in 1989 […]
President Obama apparently thinks the safer way to justify higher taxes on the super rich is to pitch the proposal based on its deficit-reduction potential. But if he wants to get the ball rolling for meaningful tax reform, Obama will summon his rhetorical powers to explain how the Buffett Rule could help reduce the nation’s massive and destructive wealth inequality.
I started a version of this post a couple weeks ago, but since then the dispute between libertarians about the place of “social justice” in their philosophy has become white-hot, […]
People tend to see their ideological affiliation as constitutive of their identity in a way their opinion about, say, the ontology of mental illness isn’t.
President Obama said Monday that overturning the Affordable Care Act would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step.” But by all accounts oral argument in the Supreme Court went badly for supporters […]
Batman is wrong to be nonlethal in the case of the Joker. This shows we can, in some cases, morally kill someone against his will. I am something of a […]
Today’s interviews with Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Richard Shelby mark the final installment of What Went Wrong?, Big Think’s series on the financial crisis. Over the past few months, we sat […]
Stanford economics professor John Taylor has some ideas about the financial crisis. For one, he doesn’t believe that the Fed could have done much more than they did during the […]
For this week’s installment of What Went Wrong? we bring you an interview with the Nobel Prize winning economist, Vernon Smith. Having studied bubbles inside and out, he has said […]
For this week’s installment of What Went Wrong?, we bring you the media perspective from Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times columnist and author of “Too Big To Fail,” and […]
As part of the third week of Big Think’s series “What Went Wrong?,” the Former CEO of BB&T John Allison discusses the role of governmental policies in creating the housing […]
Over the next few months, Big Think is rolling out a series of interviews with leading economics experts to analyze the financial crisis and answer some pressing questions: Who’s to […]
Professional sport is a hotbed of “performance anxiety” — and to start managing pressure in all settings, we need to properly define it.
First discovered in the mid-1960s, no cosmic signal has taught us more about the Universe, or spurred more controversy, than the CMB.
Since the mid-1960s, the CMB has been identified with the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Could any alternative explanations still work?
Today, the deepest depths of intergalactic space aren’t at absolute zero, but at a chill 2.73 K. How does that temperature change over time?
Taking the floor is all about connecting authentically with your audience. Here’s how.