Why our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading & Daydreaming It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. So I’m biased as a writer. And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality.
This Is Water: David Foster Wallace on Life On September 12, 2008, David Foster Wallace took his own life, becoming a kind of patron-saint of the “tortured genius” myth of creativity. Just three years prior to his suicide, he stepped onto the podium at Kenyon College and delivered one of the most timeless graduation speeches of all time — the only public talk he ever gave on his views of life. The speech, which includes a remark about suicide by firearms that came to be extensively discussed after DFW’s own eventual suicide, was published as a slim book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (public library). You can hear the original delivery in two parts below, along with the the most poignant passages. On solipsism and compassion, and the choice to see the other: On the double-edged sword of the intellect, which Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Anne Lamott have spoken to: On empathy and kindness, echoing Einstein:
Giorgio Agamben: “El ciudadano es para el Estado un terrorista virtual” Si hay un filósofo característico del presente es Giorgio Agamben. Nació en Roma en 1942, pero su obra globalizada no puede desligarse de sus actividades en Francia, Inglaterra y Alemania, entre otros países en los que ha trabajado. Es fácil detectar en ella la influencia de Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin y Michel Foucault, pero también las de Kafka y el situacionista Guy Debord. Su obra, que nunca pierde de vista la relación del hombre con el lenguaje, no se agota en la filosofía entendida como disciplina, sino que se extiende por todos los ámbitos del saber: de la literatura a las artes plásticas, de la filología a la antropología, pasando por la teología y, por supuesto, por la política. “La filosofía moderna ha fracasado en su tarea política porque ha traicionado su tarea poética” Habla un español fluido, herencia de su amistad con el poeta José Bergamín, a quien, tras su regreso a España, visitaba casi cada año. En realidad, serían actividades destinadas a cruzarse.
How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put in the world to rise above.Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart in African Queen (1951) Questions about what matters, and why, and what exists in the world, are quintessentially philosophical. The answers to many of these questions are informed by how we conceive of ourselves. How has what is often described as the ‘Copernican revolution’ effected by Charles Darwin changed our self-conception? One particularly surprising feature of evolutionary biology is that it lends significant support to existentialism. To make the journey from evolutionary biology to existentialism, let’s start with one of the oldest and most profound of philosophical questions: how do we decide what is right or wrong, good or bad? In Principia Ethica (1903), the philosopher G E Moore adduced what he called an ‘open question argument’ for a similar constraint on any discourse about value. Moore’s formulation has given rise to an enormous amount of debate.
It’s Time to Rethink How We Are Educating Our Children In Brief On the whole, the way we educate students hasn't gotten a major upgrade in more than a century. Technology has both revolutionized what we need to teach to children, but also the capabilities that we have at our disposal to teach. Educating for the Future Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars. The school’s name is Ad Astra, meaning ‘to the stars’, and seems to be based around Musk’s belief that schools should “teach to the problem, not to the tools.” Musk’s decision highlights a bigger issue, how we educate people needs to change. Parents should be the most concerned. However for parents today things have gotten even more complicated. It starts by rethinking what a school is. The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in.
The influential Confucian philosopher you’ve never heard of A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child, but then stop, because they realise that the crumbling old well could collapse under their weight. The fact is that we cannot be entirely sure what a human in this situation will do. This thought experiment was formulated by the ancient Confucian Mengzi, the most influential philosopher in world history whom you have probably never heard of. Although Mengzi was born long after Confucius died, he is referred to as the ‘Second Sage’ because he shaped the form that Confucianism would take for the next two millennia, not just in China, but also in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Confucius (551-479 BCE) did not regard himself as founding a school. Syndicate this Essay
Albert Einstein on spirituality, the strongest force to remain true to your purpose The history of being human is, decidedly, the history of human effort. “Everything that the human race has done and thought has been concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1930 in a great article for the New York Times. “One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development,” he states. His article aims not only to explain the development of religions and the social and moral necessity of a God (conceived to satisfy desires and to relieve pain), but also of a third state of religious experience that has nothing to do with dogmas and which belongs to everyone, even if, as he says, “it is rarely found in a pure form.” Einstein considered the cosmic religious feeling to be of the highest sphere of human capabilities. For Einstein, the central problem of this cosmic religious feeling is the difficulty it poses at transmitting it to others.
What is consciousness? A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories In 2017, the world saw a China more eager to take its place as a global leader, with president Xi Jinping heralding the importance of a globalized world at Davos, just ahead of Donald Trump’s “America First” inauguration in January, and portraying China as being on the frontlines in fighting climate change. But despite the pride felt by many at China’s stature in the world, at home, there was also uneasiness over the future. The list of things to worry about includes the ability of China’s economy to stay strong even as it piles up debt, increasing inequality, and the cost of life (in particular, children’s education). And while China gained more clarity with the conclusion of a once-in-five-year leadership congress that cemented Xi as the most powerful leader in decades, the meeting also ushered in more uncertainty for what happens after 2022, with no clear successor in sight. Incredible, my country Don’t bow, GDP will fall Thermos Buddhist Youths Poverty has limited my imagination
Robots Learn the Basic Algorithm that Underpins Human Intelligence? Theory of Connectivity The human brain is the most sophisticated organ in the human body. The things that the brain can do, and how it does them, have even inspired a model of artificial intelligence (AI). Now, a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience shows how human intelligence may be a product of a basic algorithm. This algorithm is found in the Theory of Connectivity, a “relatively simple mathematical logic underlies our complex brain computations,” according to researcher and author Joe Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, co-director of the Augusta University Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Cognitive and Systems Neurobiology. Basically, it’s a theory about how the acquisition of knowledge, as well as our ability to generalize and draw conclusions from them, is a function of billions of neurons assembling and aligning. The brain’s formula
Introduction to Philosophy/The Branches of Philosophy The Branches of Philosophy[edit] Western philosophy can be divided into six branches that have assumed various importance over time. Traditionally metaphysics sets the questions for philosophy. Understanding philosophy in the 6th century b.c. involves taking into account different priorities than those of the 19th century a.d. Epistemology[edit] The theory of knowledge, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech), is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin, scope and possibility of knowledge. [edit] Metaphysics however (derived from the Greek words " meta & physika ") - meaning 'after physics'. Logic[edit] Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος (logos), originally meaning the word, or what is spoken, but coming to mean thought or reason) is most often said to be the study of arguments. Ethics[edit] Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the "science (study) of morality". Aesthetics[edit] Other Branches[edit]
La ceguera del éxito Curitiba es la capital del estado de Paraná, en el sur de Brasil. Tiene 1.9 millones de habitantes, pero con su región metropolitana alcanza un poco más de 3 millones de personas. Desde mediados del siglo XIX la ciudad recibió un gran número de inmigrantes alemanes, polacos, italianos, japoneses, ucranianos, sirios y libaneses, con sus saberes y prácticas culturales, lo que para muchos ayuda a explicar la particularidad de su desarrollo. Es mundialmente reconocida por su red integrada de transporte, por su programa de reciclaje y por tener más de 55 m2 de área verde por habitante. ¿Cómo lo logró? Entre 1943 y 1958 Curitiba contó con el "Plan Agache" (apellido del arquitecto y urbanista francés que lideró su elaboración) como directriz que orientó la construcción de grandes avenidas, la localización de las fábricas en una zona industrial y la ubicación del centro cívico donde se concentrarían los edificios gubernamentales. - Transformación de antiguas canteras en parques como el Tanguá
Why humans are cruel Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity? The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself. Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, thinks this explanation of human cruelty is, at best, incomplete. I spoke to him about why he thinks its wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization — and about his grim conclusion that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Sean Illing Can you sum up your argument about the roots of human cruelty? Paul Bloom A lot of people blame cruelty on dehumanization. Paul Bloom Why is that bogus?