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Not much. At least, that’s what I think. Ron Rosenbaum discusses the question at length in a thorough and thoroughly interesting piece in Slate. Rosenbaum’s discussion confirms my impression that […]

Finally, cartography and lycantropy meet

That’s the conclusion of Flagg Taylor—one of the leading experts on totalitarian communism: I’ve spent and continue to spend a great deal of time thinking about totalitarianism.  In what guise […]

Last Friday, I posted a piece in The Stone at The New York Times suggesting the work of philosopher John Rawls as an intellectual touchstone for the Occupy Wall Street […]

Here you can read the reaction of “the intelligent design community” to a recent article of mine.  This post, of course, is double-down shameless self-promotion, because it includes both praise of […]

1. So my post on Brooks and death got (for me) big ratings and a lot of fine criticisms–both here on BIG THINK and elsewhere. 2. I pretty much agree […]

So here’s a ferocious attack on new atheist Sam Harris from the Nation, our country’s leading leftist publication.  The conclusion: Harris is oblivious to this moral crisis [of selfish individualism]. His self-confidence […]

Bringing philosophers into the corporation is not an entirely new idea. But in our new era of computational power the Philosopher-Kings will be determining how each of us lives, thinks and feels.

Over at Portfolio magazine, there’s a predictably controversial interview with billionaire Mark Cuban, who declares that — at least for the next five years — “the Internet is dead and […]

When arrested in 1936 during a protest over the dismissal of 500 artists from the WPAFederal Art Project, Lee Krasner told the unsuspecting police officer processing her that her name […]

Thinking about revolutions is inextricable from thinking about grief. We cannot know how many lives will be lost, but we know that those left behind will engage in personal and […]

BIG THINK has done has the big service of presenting many, many excellent and expert views on what happiness is and how to be happy.  Surely, we increasingly think, this […]

Part of being a postmodern conservative is being open to the truth of the distinctively personal LOGOS of Christianity, to the possibility that the Christian understanding of being a person is […]

So this post–like some others–is meant to be diagnostic.  It’s a postmodern and conservative observation on who sophisticated Americans think they are these days.  As an attempt to be an […]

Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground. Harvard philosophy professor Sean Kelly looks for meaning in our secular age.

Behind the fiercely ambitious texts of the iconoclastic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a kind man who was nice to children and terribly polite, writes Jonathan Rée.

There’s a lot of talk on BIG THINK about evolutionary explanations of this or that human behavior.  They’re all pretty fascinating, although far from completely convincing. Darwinian explanations, for what […]

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, […]

In last month’s Harper’s, Gary Greenberg writes in “The War on Happiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking,” that, increasingly and unavoidably, the concept of enlightenment via sitting in a room […]

As Parag and Ayesha wrote yesterday, if today you cannot program computers, it is as though you have the skill to read, but not to write. For this reason, kids […]

This idea was suggested by Big Think Delphi Fellow Joseph LeDoux, of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. “Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better […]

n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]

Smart people have long had a history of quirky and inexplicable habits: Nietzsche wound up hugging horses, Freud couldn’t kick a drug addiction, Nikola Tesla adored white pigeons and loathed […]

Here’s a nice thought to start the day: the natural world operates through an endless exchange of life and death. The ecosystem, and all of the organisms it houses, squeezes […]

As a kid, I loved my oversized reproduction of Action Comics #1, the June 1938 issue in which Superman, the first true superhero, burst onto the scene and changed the […]

Father Thomas Joseph White entered the priesthood after spending countless hours as a Brown University student engrossed in the thoughts of the great philosophers – from religious thinkers such as […]

This is an interpretation of Niccolo Machivelli's 1517 imcomplete poem L'Asino. The so-called cynic cold-blooded advisor of evil shows a 'parenthetical' aestheticism in his perception of friendship. Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great prospects of aesthetic politics comes to be a useful tool for the interpretation of Machiavelli's 'poetic therapy'.

The philosopher takes a look at Nietzsche’s approach to life and death.

Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers.

Susan Neiman explains how Beavis and Butthead are perfect examples of Nietzsche’s “last men.”