Opinion | Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right! (Published 2018)
SEOUL, South Korea — On May 5, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier, in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Moselle Valley, Karl Marx was born. At the time Trier was one-tenth the size it is today, with a population of around 12,000. According to one of Marx’s recent biographers, Jürgen Neffe, Trier is one of those towns where “although everyone doesn’t know everyone, many know a lot
Opinion | The Universe Doesn’t Care About Your ‘Purpose’ (Published 2017)
Keys in hand, I took a deep breath. I flipped the ignition and the memories of my Papa rushed back, just as the familiar rumble of his Thunderbird kicked in. After a series of painful events in late 2016, I struggled to understand how almost everything around me went wrong so suddenly. If anything, I felt aimless. That is, until the moment I inherited my grandfather’s 1972 Ford Thunderbird. Immedi
Opinion | Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union (Published 2017)
Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges o
Opinion | Can We Live With Contradiction? (Published 2017)
The philosopher Peter Singer was once attacked for contradicting himself. Singer advanced an ethical theory in which the most worthwhile thing was complex conscious life and feeling, and did not shy away from the logical consequence that the life of a severely mentally impaired human was worth less than that of a chicken. Journalists then discovered that Singer’s mother had Alzheimer’s and that he
Opinion | Why We Never Die (Published 2016)
As a child, I was terrified of death. It was often in the twilight hours, between the moment of lying down and the imperceptible instant of slipping off to sleep, that the terror would arise. The thought of vanishing completely from the world, of being engulfed in ineradicable darkness, would seize upon me and crush with it the very existence of the world. It was not simply that I would no longer
Opinion | No, He’s Not Hitler. And Yet ... (Published 2016)
We are supposed to find some solace these days in the assurance that Donald Trump is “not Hitler.” One reasonable response is this: Of course he isn’t. Only Hitler is Hitler, and he died in a bunker in 1945. There is no such thing as reincarnation, and history is nothing more than a long, linear series of individual people and events that come and go. It is, as the saying goes, “just one damn thin
Opinion | Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter. (Published 2016)
Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.” I find this odd because we
'Son of Saul,' Kierkegaard and the Holocaust
Christian Harting, left, and Geza Rohrig in a scene from “Son of Saul.”Credit Sony Pictures Classics, via Associated Press I. Art is often the subject of philosophy. But every now and then, a work of art — something other than a lecture or words on a page — can function as philosophy. “Son of Saul,” a film set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, is such a work of art. It engages with a pro
Opinion | The Data Against Kant (Published 2016)
THE history of moral philosophy is a history of disagreement, but on one point there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn’t possibly do. This principle — that “ought” implies “can,” that our moral obligations can’t exceed our abilities — played a central role in the work of Immanuel Kant and has been widely accepted since. Indeed, the idea seem
When Philosophy Lost Its Way
By Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle January 11, 2016 3:21 am January 11, 2016 3:21 am The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods — ancient, medieval and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism
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Opinion | Our Delight in Destruction (Published 2017)
Opinion | If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We? (Published 2017)
God Is a Question, Not an Answer