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The Philosophers' Magazine Blog

The Philosophers' Magazine Blog

zen habits 1000-Word Philosophy | Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time Crickets The phrase a heavy heart had always seemed so weird to me. How could a heart be heavier than you were used to? I feel it now. Maybe it comes when waves of sadness crashes down onto the shores mixed in with the debris of shock and confusion. It grows heavy as the air around me becomes thickened with dark unease and my lungs struggle to breathe in oxygen. I write about this crushing pressure as I continue to maintain a smile on my exterior. Today, I carried my heavy heart home. Filed under Arjun I haven’t updated this in a long time. If not for my readers, for the sake of my memory that they will all be documented to the best of my ability. Today, right now, I am present. To anyone that is willing to listen, I’d tell them this. . 5/31/17 10:45 pm Here’s a shoutout to a wonderful woman, the security guard from our apartments. “What’s the difference between here and America? Filed under KlemmFellow “We gave you a month long supply of medicine 9 days ago. Public Health… Onward we go!

A Time Travel Website — Exploring the paradoxes of time travel Derek Sivers Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper Philosophical writing is different from the writing you'll be asked to do in other courses. Most of the strategies described below will also serve you well when writing for other courses, but don't automatically assume that they all will. Nor should you assume that every writing guideline you've been given by other teachers is important when you're writing a philosophy paper. Some of those guidelines are routinely violated in good philosophical prose (e.g., see the guidelines on grammar, below). Contents What Does One Do in a Philosophy Paper? A philosophy paper consists of the reasoned defense of some claim Your paper must offer an argument. Three Stages of Writing 1. The early stages of writing a philosophy paper include everything you do before you sit down and write your first draft. Discuss the issues with others As I said above, your papers are supposed to demonstrate that you understand and can think critically about the material we discuss in class. Make an outline Start Work Early

Cal Newport On Sam Harris and Stephen Fry’s Meditation Debate February 19th, 2019 · 44 comments A few weeks ago, on his podcast, Sam Harris interviewed the actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Early in the episode, the conversation took a long detour into the topic of mindfulness meditation. Harris, of course, is a longtime proponent of this practice. What sparked the diversion in the first place is when, early in the conversation, Fry expressed skepticism about meditation. Typically when we find ourselves in a chronic state of ill health it’s because we’ve moved away from something natural that our bodies have evolved to expect.Paleolithic man didn’t need gyms and diets because he naturally exercised and didn’t have access to an overabundance of bad food.Mindfulness mediation, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be replicating something natural that we’ve lost, but is instead itself a relatively contrived and complicated activity. Harris’s response was to compare meditation to reading. Read more » Myth Confirmed

Early Modern Texts Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog This is an excerpt from my Paolo Bozzi Prize address, "Realism and Moralism in Political Thought," last week in Turin at the conference on "Post-Truth, New Realism, and Democracy"; I'll put the whole paper on-line before long, but perhaps this bit will be of interest to some readers: Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust. The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example. The Internet is, as we all know, the great eliminator of intermediaries.

Guidelines on Reading Philosophy It will be difficult for you to make sense of some of the articles we'll be reading. This is partly because they discuss abstract ideas that you're not accustomed to thinking about. They may also use technical vocabulary which is new to you. Sometimes it won't be obvious what the overall argument of the paper is supposed to be. The prose may be complicated, and you may need to pick the article apart sentence by sentence. Contents Skim the Article to Find its Conclusion and Get a Sense of its Structure A good way to begin when you're trying to read a difficult article is to first skim the article to identify what the author's main conclusion is. When you're skimming the article, try also to get a general sense of what's going on in each part of the discussion. The articles we read won't always have a straightforward structure. This is the conclusion I want you to accept. The conclusion I want you to accept is A. Articles can be complex in other ways, too. and so on.

The Art of Manliness Consciousness and Intentionality 1. Consciousness: Different Senses (or Kinds)? On one understanding frequent among philosophers, consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject. For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you (some other way) to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state — something it's like for one who is in that state. The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. 2. But to talk in this way only invites new perplexities. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Stoicism 1. Sources of our information on the Stoics Since the Stoics stress the systematic nature of their philosophy, the ideal way to evaluate the Stoics' distinctive ethical views would be to study them within the context of a full exposition of their philosophy. From these sources, scholars have attempted to piece together a picture of the content, and in some cases, the development of Stoic doctrine. 2. When considering the doctrines of the Stoics, it is important to remember that they think of philosophy not as an interesting pastime or even a particular body of knowledge, but as a way of life. 3. An examination of Stoic ontology might profitably begin with a passage from Plato's Sophist. In accord with this ontology, the Stoics, like the Epicureans, make God a corporeal entity, though not (as with the Epicureans) one made of everyday matter. The first thing to develop from the conflagration are the elements. 4. The Skeptics responded by denying the existence of cognitive impressions. 5.

Well-Being 1. The Concept Popular use of the term ‘well-being’ usually relates to health. The philosophical use of the term also tends to encompass the ‘negative’ aspects of how a person’s life goes for them. ‘Happiness’ is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to a short-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment: ‘You look happy today’; ‘I’m very happy for you’. Over the last few decades, so-called ‘positive psychology’ has hugely increased the attention paid by psychologists and other scientists to the notion of ‘happiness’. When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individual living that life, it is preferable to use the term ‘well-being’ instead of ‘happiness’. It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories, such as Aristotle’s, result in the collapse of the very notion of well-being. Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called ‘prudential value’, to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic value or moral value. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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