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We don’t think or exist in empty space; we need nourishment from the earth, literally, to live and create.

When the citadels of knowledge for knowledge’s sake collapse, the marketers rush in to fill the void. We’re in greater need now  than ever of epistemology – a careful, systematic examination of what we know and how we know it.

It’s explanation all the way down even though we won’t get to it because the explanations are infinite and we’re finite. That’s Spinoza’s guide.  

One of my favorite BIG THINKERS, Dave Berreby, criticizes our Declaration of Independence.  Here’s the Declaration’s theory:  We have the right to life, and we have the right to the […]

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

Your first philosophers: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and one strange new face. Why the first books people read about Stoicism should be by one of these guys. On Stoicism Graduation season […]

Here are all of the arguments against Edward Snowden. This is why they are wrong.

How do we get more and more people involved in creative class work using their minds, using their creativity?

One thing that distinguishes us conservatives from libertarians is that we’re actually worried about growing inequality in America. We’re not that obsessed by the bare fact of economic inequality, but […]

It’s a great luxury for a society to take it’s 18 to 21 year olds and to let them develop as thinkers.  

1. The Bill Gates Condom The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will award a $100,000 grant to the person who invents a next-generation condom that “significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in […]

The Monster Dreamer uses a sensor-equipped headset to interpret children’s reactions to various creatures and create a 3D-printed toy that contains the features they find most interesting.

I think if you’re the driest accountant with the plastic pocket pen protector it’s in how you interact with the world. 

I think that it’s great to inspire new generations of thinkers; it’s terrible to create new authority.

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, responded quite positively to the final point of my appreciative comments on his book.  I said liberal education is always countercultural.  Mark wisely […]

Christopher Hitchens, Demystifier Extraordinaire.

We are taking Big Think as you know it today and opening our doors to go deeper and wider. We will continue to focus on big ideas, and then, help you put the ideas into practice.

We’re constantly editing our day with blinking.

The biggest lesson from Popper’s philosophy is that skepticism is the ultimate open-mindedness.

If you’re like most Americans, you probably spent most of the long Fourth of July weekend hanging out at a family BBQ, watching baseball, enjoying the fireworks and… obsessively checking […]

For Leon Wieseltier, the corrosive effects of modern technology spell the demise of humanity as we know it. I’m not so sure.

Thinking big involves taking risks, and taking risks requires a certain openness to failure. I believe it is an imperative to take such risks today because our personal welfare is […]

We are a community of messy, stumbling, fumbling beings tumbling through space wrestling with a confusing gift of consciousness. And that is the great gift of consciousness. 

Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system […]

BIG THINKER Steven Mazie does well to criticize the complacency of Stephen Asma.  Asma, citing obvious facts of evolutionary psychology, observes that our natural powers of knowing and loving are limited.  […]

I’m taking a break from talking about conservative diversity to think  more about justifying the content of liberal education these days. So here’s an account of chairs of departments of history […]

The more complex challenge you have, the more relationship matters, the depth of the relationship between the teachers and student. 

It used to be that the business landscape was a man’s world. Times are changing! Today, women are wielding more and more power on both sides of the business transaction. […]

Shepard Fairey’s aesthetic, which has so much to do with appropriating and re-imagining images — is best understood through the lens of his many colorful influences.

R.R. Reno,  quite an astute conservative public intellectual, claims that those with eyes to see know that the big news these days is the global victory of capitalism.  I’m not […]