Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle
Language can function only because there are public criteria for acceptable usage.
ByPhilosophy
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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What Daniel Dennett gets wrong
Is consciousness an illusion? Only a philosopher could convince himself of something as implausible.
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Why Sam Bankman-Fried’s deluded world-view matters
His utilitarianism reflects the culture of Silicon Valley, which wields great power over how we relate to one another.
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