The influential literary critic Harold Bloom suggested that you can. If we consider the Western literary canon, we often consider Hamlet the quintessential overthinker. But actually, Bloom says, Hamlet’s big problem “is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well. His is simply the most intelligent role ever written for the Western stage.” Why would intelligence make you anxious or miserable? Sure, being smart is no guarantee of success and happiness. But surely it doesn’t hurt? Maybe Hamlet’s intelligence lets him perceive some terrible reality that the rest of us are too dimwit ..read more

Q: What is the purpose of hatred in the world? Michelle, 32 James Tartaglia, Keele University, UK I don’t think there is any purpose to hatred, in the sense that I don’t think people were designed to hate each other in order to achieve some purpose, such as to entertain the Greek gods. I think hatred arises naturally because of the way people treat each other. Just imagine: raiders come into my village, they steal my things, they burn down my house – I’m naturally going to hate them, I wouldn’t be able to help it. The great religions and secular moral philosophies of this world have tried t ..read more

Simulation Theory—at first blush, it sounds like a cute plot device from some entertaining but predictable sci-fi film. However, many people, including some credible thinkers, take the idea that we are actually living in a simulated reality seriously. Various sorts of evidence for this notion have been proposed, including in a video on the YouTube channel The Why Files that claims that the evidence “is all around us.” It seems to me that this evidence can be summed up in two categories: poor and interesting—but only interesting for reasons that may not be obvious at first. Ultimately, I think ..read more

I write this during the election season in Israel. But don't worry, this isn't a post about party politics. Thinking about the election has merely got me thinking about the Jewish doctrine of the election. When scholars of religion talk about the doctrine of The Election, it's just a fancy way of them talking about the idea that the Jewish people are the chosen people. Few doctrines are so central to the story and mission of the Jewish people. And yet, our chosenness is also controversial, and it can easily collapse into something that looks like racism or national supremacism. Sadly, some Je ..read more

The answer to this question is "yes," but not in the way you might think. The seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza held some controversial views—including the impersonal nature of God—that caused him to be expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. One of these controversial views is his denial of free will, though he doesn't mean this in the usual sense, for which every movement of every particle in the universe is predetermined. But what he does mean continues to be the subject of debate among philosophers. Spinoza defines the will as "affections," the bodily emotions ..read more

For a practicing Jew, the work of Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, can be a bit of a tangle. On the one hand, he was obviously brilliant and was a rare success story - a homegrown boy who “made it” in the gentile-dominated world of philosophy. On the other hand, his departure from his people, both physically and philosophically, feels rather tragic for those of us who continue to fly the flag of classical Judaism. In an effort to understand, and perhaps come to terms with, some of Spinoza’s thinking I was privileged to correspond with Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes - a professional philosopher at the Un ..read more

Metaphysical Dualism Thomas Nagel is one of the most important living philosophers. Born in 1939 in Yugoslavia to Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States, Nagel is well-known for his books The View from Nowhere, Mortal Questions, and The Possibility of Altruism. But his most famous work, "What Is It Like to be a Bat?" explores the separation between mind and body. The mind-body problem has long plagued philosophy. Is there a difference between the mind and the brain? The traditional approach called "metaphysical dualism" suggests that there are two different sorts of stuff ..read more