Notes on the ineffable
How the psychologist and philosopher William James defined “mystical” experience.
ByPhilosophy
Assisted dying is not about individual suffering, but about the value we place on all human life
Compassion leads one to feel with another person. But that does not tell us what is right.
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Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle
Language can function only because there are public criteria for acceptable usage.
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Thought Experiment 4. Becoming a Vampire
Entering into a transformative experience means making a decision about what kind of “you” you want to be.
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Fredric Jameson’s capitalist horror show
We still live in the postmodern landscape defined by the Marxist thinker, who died this month.
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Thought experiment 3: The Gettier Problem
How the American philosopher Edmund Gettier’s argument complicates our understanding of what constitutes knowledge.
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Thought experiment 2: the Unconscious Violinist
How the American ethicist Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defence of bodily autonomy can be transposed on to the right to abortion.
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Elon Musk wants us to have more children
Is demography the new front line of the culture wars?
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Slavoj Žižek’s war with the left
At 75, the “rock star” intellectual has alienated many. But is his politics a strange source of sanity?
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Thought experiment 1: The Chinese Room
The American philosopher John Searle’s defence of human intelligence now has to confront today’s sophisticated AI algorithms.
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Welcome to the realm of the thought experiment
What do a hurtling trolley, a shallow pond and a famous violinist all have in common?
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Rishi Sunak’s D-Day apology reveals the limits of saying sorry
It isn’t always the hardest word. It’s often the easiest. It can trip off the tongue far too readily.
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Walking into the past
Exploring London’s ragged borderland offers new perspectives on love, loss and the ephemeral nature of life.
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Judith Butler and the fear of gender
In the 1990s a new philosophy helped open up alternative ways of being. Nobody predicted it would lead to war.
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The man who lived at the end of history
Why the 20th-century intellectual Ernesto de Martino believed that we should prepare for the apocalypse.
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Enter the Age of Malthus
The climate crisis, geopolitical disorder, and the rise of the “praetorian regime”.
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John Gray and Peter Thiel: Life in a postmodern world
A conversation between the philosopher and the venture capitalist.
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Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
Will the idealist philosophy survive the conviction of its crypto king?
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On the slaughter-bench of history
Hegel’s analysis of humanity as stumbling from one horror to the next remains all too relevant.
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Letter of the week: World leaders must show the way forward
Write to letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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