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Tools for Thinking: Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Freedom
— ‘Freedom’ is a powerful word. We all respond positively to it, and under its banner revolutions have been started, wars have been fought, and political campaigns are continually being waged. But what...
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The 3 Thinking Levels (What Smart People Use to Outperform Others)
Einstein once said, “You can’t solve a problem from the level of thinking that created the problem in the first place“. The process of thinking involves several levels, but only a few people think...
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We All Know That We Will Die, so Why Do We Struggle to Believe It?
— By James Baillie In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the...
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How Mengzi Came up With Something Better Than the Golden Rule
— By Eric Schwitzgebel There’s something I don’t like about the ‘Golden Rule’, the admonition to do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Consider this passage from the ancient Chinese...
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The Adversarial Culture in Philosophy Does Not Serve the Truth
By Martin Lenz Philosophical discussions, whether in a professional setting or at the bar, frequently consist of calling out mistakes in whatever has been proposed: ‘This is all very well, but …’ This...
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How William James Encourages Us to Believe in the Possible
By Temma Ehrenfeld — In college, I developed a mysterious illness. I experienced myself as happy, yet in the afternoons I would cry for two hours. Although the obvious interpretation was depression, to...
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The Dark Shadow in the Injunction to ‘Do What You Love’
Why do we work? Many of us might give a simple transactional answer to the question: we work in order to make money. For the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-70), and the management thinkers...
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For Nietzsche, Life’s Ultimate Question Was: ‘Does It Dance?’
Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the...
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Marcus Aurelius Helped Me Survive Grief and Rebuild My Life
‘When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values.’ From The Woman Destroyed (1967) by Simone de Beauvoir It’s a...
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Don’t Take Life So Seriously: Montaigne’s Lessons on the Inner Life
By Dorian Rolston My dad was an unhappy man. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. By the time his health...
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For Nietzsche, Life’s Ultimate Question Was: ‘Does It Dance?’
By Kimerer Lamothe Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic...
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