New comet findings: Is this how life on Earth began?

In its most recent dispatch from the comet 67P—which it landed on last November after taking 10 years to make the 4-billion-mile trip to get there—the European Space Agency’s Philae lander has found compounds that are known to be the building blocks of life. This adds to a hunch that scientists have had for many […]

The Familistery, a 19th century utopianist reality (documentary)

Jean-Baptiste André Godin (26 January 1817 — 29 January 1888) was a French industrialist, writer and political theorist, and social innovator. A manufacturer of cast-iron stoves and influenced by Charles Fourier, he developed and built an industrial and residential community within Guise called the Familistère (Social Palace). He ultimately converted it to cooperative ownership and […]

Isn’t the analytic/continental divide a 20th-century curiosity?

Dear all, Isn’t the analytic/continental divide a 20th-century curiosity? Isn’t it time to question the esprit de corps of some ‘analytic philosophy’ departments? I am studying the genealogy of the notion of esprit de corps from a multiple perspective: philosophy, conceptual history, discourse analysis and political thought. Esprit de corps is a fighting spirit and […]

The Philosophy of Food

Philosophers have a long but scattered history of analyzing food. Plato famously details an appropriate diet in Book II of the Republic. The Roman Stoics, Epicurus and Seneca, as well as Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, and Nietzsche, all discuss various aspects of food production and consumption. In the twentieth century, philosophers […]

Teaching primary school children philosophy improves English and maths skills, says study

Teaching philosophy to primary school children can improve their English and maths skills, according to a pilot study highlighting the value of training pupils to have inquiring minds. Children from deprived backgrounds benefited the most from philosophical debates about topics such as truth, fairness and knowledge, researchers from Durham University found. read more here

Bergson, Buddha and other fruits

Karma – the Ripening Fruit Bhikkhu Ñāṇađivako from Main Currents in Modern Thought, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1972) I With the decline of Newtonian physics and the emergence of quantum theory and relativity, the physical world-picture in the West became centered around a process-concept. Natural sciences and nineteenth century scientifically oriented philosophy were in quest […]