This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! I see myself and a multitude of other Grasshoppers engaged in playing the most elaborate, subtle, and challenging games. […] And the Utopians will look back on names like Queensbury, Naismith, the Parker Brothers, even Rubix, with the same indulgent condescension that today’s physicists look back on those ancient investigators who proclaimed air, earth, fire, and water to be basic elements of n ..read more

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! EGO Hey, Philosophy. How can you help ensure the future of humanity? PHILOSOPHY Hi Ego, old friend. Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Your question assumes that I can help ensure the future of humanity. We should test that assumption before proceeding to answer the question. If the assumption is wrong, any answer to the question will also be wrong. EGO Dude, you always do this! Look, I real ..read more

Edward made his decision on January 6th, a belated New Year’s resolution. Although it was sudden, he had been building up to it for months, years even. It would take several more months, too, to tailor and refine the decision before putting it into action. Edward’s decision was, for the rest of his life, never to spend more than one night in any given place. Each morning he would move somewhere else to sleep. He was, of course, sufficiently pragmatic to accept that it would not always be possible to abide by his resolution. Illness, terrible weather or transport problems might occasionally for ..read more

Is abortion ethical? Judith Jarvis Thomson created one of the most well-known thought experiments in modern ethics. In her 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion,” she presents the thought experiment of the unconscious violinist: You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the vi ..read more

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. The final winner will be chosen by the readers of the Daily Philosophy newsletter. If you’d like to vote for your favourite, please go here, where you can subscribe for free and take part in the selection process. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! “Humanity’s future depends on our management of two crucial relationships: that between man and nature, and that between man and man.” — Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought. In ..read more

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. The final winner will be chosen by the readers of the Daily Philosophy newsletter. If you’d like to vote for your favourite, please go here, where you can subscribe for free and take part in the selection process. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! A “Philos” of We As it is now, philosophy seems to exist in an isolated sphere, speaking without being heard by anyone but other philosophers. Who but other philosophers knows the deta ..read more

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. The final winner will be chosen by the readers of the Daily Philosophy newsletter. If you’d like to vote for your favourite, please go here, where you can subscribe for free and take part in the selection process. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! Philosophy as moral thinking? As the climate crisis has become the “defining issue of our times,"1 philosophers are increasingly devoting their efforts to analyse such an issue. Quite ..read more

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024. The final winner will be chosen by the readers of the Daily Philosophy newsletter. If you’d like to vote for your favourite, please go here, where you can subscribe for free and take part in the selection process. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! When I was an undergraduate, a friend told me that, if you go to any article in the English-language version of Wikipedia, then click on the first link in the article to another Wikipe ..read more

There have been increasingly clamorous calls for the banning, removal, or controlling, or censoring of ‘misinformation’ as an enforced general policy. This may be through law backed by punishment. But what does this mean? The calls seem also to be suggesting that something new and perilous is happening in human life that was not there before. That now, because of misinformation, something especially harmful is occurring. The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ is not one I like as it comes loaded with an assumptive catch-all normative condemnation and is ironically misleading, to the point that ..read more

The paradox of fiction asks how we can experience genuine emotions for things that are not real. How we can fear a monster in a horror movie, or shed tears for a tragic hero in a play? After all, we know that these characters are just made up. If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me! Scared by things that don’t exist? The paradox of fiction arises from three seemingly true but incompatible claims: We have emotional responses to fictional characters, objects, and events that we encounter in works of art. To hav ..read more