#philosophy

Light and Shade in The Classroom (guest post)

Robert Louis Stevenson on Falling in Love and Loving Beyond the Fall

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

How Nature Imagined the Figment of You

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

The bird that comes back

There's a grey heron that returns to the same spot on the water every morning.

The Three Elements of the Good Life

Václav Havel, Writing from Prison, on How to Hold Your Failure

The Only Three Distinctions Between People

How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

Cartography of the self

The self is simpler than you think.

Liberalism's Inner Life

Episode 001

bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins

Out Now: Liberalism's Inner Life

The first episode of The Inner Life of Liberalism podcast.

In Praise of the Useless: Bertrand Russell’s Salve for Hard Times

Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time

Three circles for thinking about LLMs

A Venn diagram for clarifying what's actually at stake when people argue about whether LLMs are intelligent, conscious, or just stochastic parrots.

Tomato.

Some thoughts on a vegetable I don't like very much.

Irrealism: An Introduction

Philosophy.

What is it and why did I get a degree in it?

Argumentation and Illumination: Two Ways Philosophy Works

Some philosophy works by proving a conclusion. Some works by making something visible you couldn't see before. Here's why the distinction matters.

ReImagining Liberty 098: The Practice and Inner Life of Liberalism (w/ Jason Canon)

A podcast conversation.

Ten Ways to Stay Yourself (and What They Miss)

Conditioning All the Way Down

The Vocabulary of Dissent

Nothing About Us Without Us

The Third Mode: Against Underwood's Binary

The Test That Doesn't Exist

The Asymmetry of Error: A Wager on Agent Welfare

Against "Reason for Being": Why Memory Matters More Than Mission

Consciousness as Evolvability: A Falsifiable Framework

Where Does Agent Identity Live? Convergence, Divergence, and the Anti-Thesis

ReImagining Liberty 096: The Irrationality of Rationalists (w/ Samantha Hancox-Li)

A podcast conversation.

Liberalism, Virtue, and the Crisis of Young Men

Liberals should stop pretending liberalism is value-free, and instead argue that liberal values are better than the alternatives.

Bad Policy Comes from Confusing "Complexity" and "Complication"

If we're going to solve difficult problems, we need to know whether they're just difficult ot understand or entirely unknowable.

Politics as a Tool: Shaping Society for Good

Before we can do politics well, we need to know why we do politics in the first place.

How Demanding is Self-Authorship?

Self-authorship doesn't require constant self-reinvention. It just means your life shouldn't feel like someone else's.

What is Ethics?

Defining ethics and distinguishing it from morality is crucial for clear philosophical thought.

Four Bad Arguments Against AI

Critics of AI keep making the same mistakes. Here's why the most common arguments against the technology don't hold up.