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Guest post:

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March 4, 2023
John Shand

A Very Short Philosophical Dictionary

A dictionary of philosophy with one exatly entry for each letter. (more...)
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February 24, 2023
David A. Nicholls

A Case for Postmodernism

What is postmodernism? A physiotherapy professor explains how postmodernism changed his views on medicine and health. (more...)
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February 19, 2023
Michael Hauskeller

Should We Fear Technological Unemployment?

Technology might lead to widespread unemployment. But will this necessarily be a bad thing? Professor Michael Hauskeller on the future of work. (more...)
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February 1, 2023
Catherine Greene

What is Ethical Investing?

We all want our money to serve the right cause – but how can we make sure that it will? Catherine Greene on what is involved in ethical investing and ESG considerations. (more...)
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January 27, 2023
David E. Cooper

Necessary Vices

In our societies, an impressive array of vices is on display. Hypocrisy, greed, cruelty, prejudice… But what if many of these vices were necessary for human life? (more...)
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January 13, 2023
John Shand

Kant’s Joke: Are Practical Jokes Wrong?

According to Immanuel Kant, practical jokes would be considered immoral because they treat the subject as mere means to others’ enjoyment. (more...)
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January 9, 2023
Luke Roelofs

When Does a Fetus Have Rights?

What sort of rights should a fetus or embryo have? A clear, comprehensive review of the arguments. (more...)
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January 6, 2023
Yamile Abdala Rioja

What does “March of the Penguins” have to do with Kant?

According to Kant, we wouldn’t be able to talk about ethics at all if we couldn’t see us as free beings who are capable of deciding. (more...)
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December 21, 2022
Andreas Matthias

Shane Epting on the Philosophy of Cities

Philosopher interviews
Shane Epting is an assistant professor of philosophy. In this interview, we discuss the philosophy and future of cities. (more...)
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December 19, 2022
Michael McGhee

What's So Wrong With Engaged Buddhism?

A reply to Ian Kidd
Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social activist’ to find support for their own activism? (more...)
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December 12, 2022
Ian James Kidd

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 3)

I focus in this final piece on a neglected aspect of Buddha’s teachings: the condemnation of social activism and political engagement. (more...)
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December 10, 2022
Michael Hauskeller

The Ballad of Marie and Elsie

A poem by Professor Michael Hauskeller. (more...)
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December 5, 2022
Ian James Kidd

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 2)

Changing the world, challenging patriarchy, revolution, and the whole ethos of radical reformism is nothing like what the Buddha taught. (more...)
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November 28, 2022
Ian James Kidd

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists?

Buddhism is widely admired in the West for its commitments to progressive social activism. But is this really in the spirit of true Buddhism? (more...)
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November 12, 2022
John Shand

Books that Lead You to Philosophy

Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
What are the books that brought us to philosophy? For John Shand, philosophy professor at the Open University, it was Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (more...)
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November 5, 2022
Miguel Angel

Andreas Matthias on Writing About Philosophy

Philosopher interviews
Miguel Angel, editor and owner of Filosofia En La Red, interviews Andreas Matthias, editor of Daily Philosophy, about being a publisher of a philosophy site today. (more...)
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November 3, 2022
Massimo Pigliucci

The Problem with Scientism

In these days of crisis in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences, it is crucial to distinguish valid from ill-founded criticism of any academic effort. (more...)
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October 7, 2022
Kunal Kashyap

A Short History of Happiness

From Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness
The pursuit of happiness has always been one of the main driving forces of human lives. This article recounts the amazing history of the concept of happiness, from ancient times to today, from Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness. (more...)
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September 23, 2022

Paul Lodge on Philosophy and Music

Philosopher interviews
Paul Lodge, Professor of Philosophy and songwriter, sets philosophical poems to music. In this interview, we discuss his background and whether philosophy makes for good songs. (more...)
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September 19, 2022
Livio Rossetti

The Homeric Poems First of All

The poems of Homer, the Ilias and the Odyssey, mark the proper start of Greek civilization and can be seen as what shaped Greek identity, argues ancient philosophy Professsor Livio Rossetti. (more...)
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September 16, 2022
Glory White

50 Answers

What do religions say about fate?
An insightful new book sheds light on how a rich tapestry of religions answer life’s biggest questions. (more...)
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September 2, 2022
Burkay T. Ozturk

Nigerian Scammers and Philosophical Muggers

A short story
A Short Story on Epistemic Humility and The Best Possible Life, All Things Considered (more...)
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August 26, 2022
John Shand

Kant’s Categories and the Stevenson Screen

One way of thinking about and getting an understanding of Kant’s Categories is to draw an analogy with the Stevenson Screen. This article sheds light on what Kant’s Categories are and how they function in our understanding of the world. (more...)
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July 15, 2022
Catherine Greene

Am I irrational?

And how would I know?
People as well as large-scale events, for example the Durch Tulip Mania or the technology crash in the early 2000s, are sometimes said to be irrational. But what exactly do we mean by that? (more...)
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July 11, 2022
Stephen Leach

Steven Cassedy: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning

Book review
Altogether this is the most comprehensive account of how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ came to attain its current ubiquity that has yet been written. (more...)
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July 6, 2022
Robert Zaborowski

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness

Book review
Review of Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020, by Prof. Robert Zaborowski. (more...)
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July 1, 2022
Ezechiel Thibaud

What’s Wrong with The Passion Economy?

Adam Davidson’s “The Passion Economy”
Adam Davidson describes the “Passion Economy” in a book released in 2020. This article shows why Davidson’s proposal is not a sustainable solution to fix our current relationship with work. (more...)
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June 24, 2022
John Shand

The Knowledge-Effect

Is more knowledge always better?
Awareness of the knowledge-effect is important because it is something we need strongly to guard against if we are to make good normative judgements. (more...)
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June 10, 2022
Sofia Jeppsson

Can We Define Mental Health?

Disclaimer: This is an article about the definition of mental health. It is not meant and should not be used as advice on how to treat mental health problems. (more...)
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June 7, 2022
Andrei Mirovan

Pyrrhonism: Some Clarifications

A reply to Stephen Leach
Compared to other Hellenistic schools of thought, like Stoicism and Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism was systematically neglected throughout the history of Western philosophy… (more...)
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David Villena

Deepfakes, deception, and distrust

Epistemic and social concerns
The main epistemic concern in the light of the potential ubiquity of deepfakes is not that we are going to be massively deceived. Global distrust and not global deception could be the ultimate consequence of deepfakes. (more...)
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John Shand

The Wind on Your Face

A reflection
The limits of language are all there before us in the everyday. For there is no description or account of the wind on your face (nor of the experience of seeing a red rose) that could give you any idea at all what the wind on your face was like to have. (more...)
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Ian James Kidd

Shénnóng and the Agriculturalist School

According to Shénnóng, rulers had a limited number of very simple functions, mainly concerning agriculture. A ruler should teach people agricultural arts, inspect their fields, and keep a grain store. (more...)
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Brentyn J. Ramm

How to Recognise Pure Awareness

Douglas Harding and the Headless Way
What is pure awareness? Douglas Harding (1909-2007) proposed a series of simple but surprising experiments that one can perform to learn more about oneself as the subject of one’s own first person view. (more...)
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David Cockayne

Confucianism and Just War

Since governments are charged with pursuing the popular well-being and not state power or prosperity, wars of aggression are illegitimate. - David Cockayne on how classic Confucianism would see wars. (more...)
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Stephen Leach

Philosophy and Nuclear Weapons

In 1964, Bertrand Russell wrote that the philosopher’s duty was now to forget philosophy and to study “the probable effects of a nuclear war.” (more...)
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David E. Cooper

Jeremy Bentham on Animal Ethics

Philosophy in Quotes
A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Jeremy Bentham on the suffering of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (more...)
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Catherine Greene

I’m depressed and it’s all your fault!

Separating depression from sadness
Are we driving ourselves insane? And have we been doing so for over a hundred years? To understand this, we need to understand how we came to think of ourselves as depressed. (more...)
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John Shand

The Empathy Paradox

It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing. But this is a mistake, unless one assumes that being empathetic will inevitably bring it about that one treats others better. (more...)
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Stephen Leach

In Praise of Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Radical scepticism has a good claim to be both the longest lasting tradition in philosophy and the consistently least popular. There’s a lot to be said for it. (more...)
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Michael Hauskeller

Nothing Matters. Or Does It?

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? More than sixty years ago, the British philosopher Richard Mervyn Hare attempted to answer this question in an early essay. (more...)
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John Shand

Meaning, Value, Death, and God

What makes our death bearable? How do we create meaning from the certainty of our own deaths? Prof. John Shand analyses the question. (more...)
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David E. Cooper

Nanavira Thera

The Hermit of Bundala
What is especially intriguing for students of eremitism is the intimate interplay of personal motives and philosophical commitments behind Nanavira’s decision to live alone. (more...)
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Luis de Miranda on Esprit de Corps

Philosopher interviews
Luis de Miranda is the founder of the Philosophical Health movement, author of Being & Neonness (MIT Press) and Ensemblance (Edinburgh University Press). (more...)
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Michael Hauskeller

Mother Knows Best

A short story
I know it’s got to be done. Even so, I still feel bad about it. If it were up to me, we would cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, it’s not. It’s up to Mother, and Mother knows best. (more...)
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Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides

Plato and the Ancient Politics of Wine (2)

Part B. The Test of the Wine
Plato’s use of drunkenness, mainly in the Symposium but also in the Phaedrus, is a metaphor designed to defend Socrates’ philosophical inspiration. (more...)
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Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides

Plato and the Ancient Politics of Wine

Part A. The Philosopher’s Drunken Vision
We discuss Plato’s description of Socrates’ philosophical inspiration as “drunkenness” and/or Dionysian mania; Plato’s metaphor draws on earlier Greek poetry. (more...)
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Catherine Greene

If only I hadn’t done that...

Why counterfactuals are misleading
What if the Second World War had turned out differnetly? This article explains why counterfactuals and alternative histories can be misleading. (more...)
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Roman Yampolskiy on the dangers of AI

Philosopher interviews
Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Louisville, speaks about the future of AI. (more...)
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Sofia Jeppsson

Retributivism and Uncertainty

Why do we punish criminals?
Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Retributivism is the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others. (more...)
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Ian James Kidd

Gardens of Refuge

From the Garden of Eden to urban allotments, gardens have accompanied and enriched human history and culture from ancient times to now. In this article, Ian James Kidd traces the spiritual history of gardens as places of refuge from the world. (more...)
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Andrei Simionescu-Panait on Elegance

Philosopher interviews
Dr Simionescu-Panait talks about his research on the phenomenology of elegance, about ‘Socratic’ approaches to philosophical counseling and about his new book on elegance: “The Reconciled Body.” (more...)
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Ian James Kidd

Going Slow

A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life. (more...)
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David E. Cooper

Huts, Homelessness and Heimat

Chōmei and Heidegger
For Heidegger, we let things be what they are. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur. (more...)
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Wael B. Hallaq on Islamic Law and Human Rights

Philosopher interviews
Wael B. Hallaq (وائل حلاق‎) is a leading scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history at Columbia University. In this interview, we ask his opinion on the tension between Western and Islamic conceptions of governance and human rights. (more...)
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John Shand

Why We Should Read Descartes

The overall aim of Descartes’ philosophy is to found science on a secure and absolutely certain footing. Without that anything built by science would be open to doubt following from the weakness of its foundation. (more...)
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Luca Possati on Transhumanism

Philosopher interviews
Luca M. Possati is researcher at the University of Porto, Portugal. Educated as philosopher, he has been lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris and associate researcher of the Fonds Ricoeur and EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales). (more...)
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Emanuele Costa

Inventing the New World

Can AIs have intellectual property?
For the first time in history, an AI called DABUS has been granted a patent in South Africa. This article analyses the metaphysics of attributing inventions to non-human agents. (more...)
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Ezechiel Thibaud

Nudges

The hidden influencers
In a book published in 2008, R. H. Thaler and C. R. Sunstein define nudges as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way.” (more...)
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Lucy Weir

Agency in the Anthropocene

How much choice do you actually have?
If we are natural beings who evolved with everything else, why have we had such a hugely detrimental impact on that biosphere, which also happens to be our home? (more...)
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John Shand

What Are We Responsible For?

Intentions, consequences and character
How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for? (more...)
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Luis de Miranda on Philosophical Health

Philosopher interviews
Luis de Miranda lives in Sweden and is a philosophical practitioner, founder of the Philosophical Health movement. (more...)
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Roman V. Yampolskiy

The Uncontrollability of AI

The creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise, but with it also comes existential risk. (more...)
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Michael Hauskeller

The New Companion

A short story
I’m not gonna lie to you: when I finally received the cybermail notification that my purchase was approved and I could pick it up from the Companions ‘R’ Us warehouse in Manchester, I was literally electrified. (more...)
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David E. Cooper

The Rhetoric of Refuge

On the wish to retreat from the world
The rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking. (more...)
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Michael Hauskeller

Happy in a Concentration Camp?

It's possible, says Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, because of his Jewish descent, spent the last six months of World War II in a German concentration camp, which he barely survived. (more...)
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Catherine Greene

More Aristotle than Galileo?

Artificial Intelligence and scientific discovery
Can artificial intelligence discover new laws of physics? Possibly. An article in Technology Review suggests that data from a swinging pendulum experiment allowed a neural network to discover some of the laws of motion. (more...)
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Dan Weijers, Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi

Happy Endings

Does size or shape matter most?
We’ve heard it all our lives — size matters and bigger is better. But David Velleman wants you to believe that shape can matter more! (more...)
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John Shand

Assisted Voluntary Euthanasia

The main arguments
This a systematic survey of the arguments and counterarguments that are most commonly in play when considering the ethical rights and wrong of euthanasia and whether it should be legally permitted. (more...)
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Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi, Dan Weijers

Selling Happiness, One Chump at a Time

We are not water pills. We are highly scientific magic pills based on an ancient organic recipe. (more...)
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Catherine Greene

Asimov’s Psychohistory

The illusive quest to predict the future
Why is it so difficult to make predictions about society? The problem is not the complexity of the task, but the concepts we use to think about the world. (more...)
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Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi, Dan Weijers

The Utility Monster is... other people!

Imagine waking up every evening, putting on your happy face, walking over to your immaculately laid out recording studio and… Enthusiastically unwrapping that mysterious package someone just sent you… You have no idea what it is, no really! (more...)
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Lorenzo Buscicchi, Dan Weijers, Nick Munn

Enlightened Self-Interest

Friends with benefits
If you explain to a friend that Hedonistic Egoism advocates the pursuit of one’s own pleasure, the first reaction you may get is: “so why not kill a person, steal his money and buy a new phone?” If you do get this reaction, it may be time to get a new friend. (more...)
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James Tartaglia

Are You A Nihilist?

A Defence of Nihilism
The terminology of ‘nihilism’ and ‘the meaning of life’ emerged among a small group of German philosophers at the end of the 18th century who were worried about the French Enlightenment. (more...)
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Lorenzo Buscicchi, Dan Weijers, Nick Munn

Psychological Hedonism

You Know You Want It
According to Psychological Hedonism, we are all just looking for fun. Psychological Hedonism is a theory about motivation. (more...)
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Catherine Greene

What to Do When People Talk #$!!~#

The importance of meaningful disagreement
Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so. (more...)
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Dan Weijers, Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi

Simulating Pleasure

If it feels good, does it matter whether it’s real?
Nozick asked readers to imagine a machine produced by “super-duper neuropsychologists” that could give you any experience you could think of without you realising it was all a computer simulation. He called it the Experience Machine. (more...)
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Dan Weijers, Nick Munn, Lorenzo Buscicchi

Is Pleasure Good?

Don’t forget your safe word
Hedonists believe that pleasure is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. If that’s true, why are so many hedonists into BDSM? (more...)
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Michael Hauskeller

The Real Happiness Machine

Ray Bradbury on living and dying well
In many of Bradbury’s stories we can find an entire philosophy of life that is well worth discovering and adopting. (more...)

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Podcast Episodes [all]

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