Category Essays

Albert Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus with what he called the only truly serious philosophical question: whether life is worth living. Camus argued that the universe is indifferent to human concerns, it offers no inherent meaning, no purpose, no…

Edmund Husserl dedicated some of his most intricate phenomenological analyses to the experience of time. In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Husserl described how the present moment is not a knife-edge instant but a structure with “retention” (the just-past still…

Lev Vygotsky argued that higher cognitive functions, abstract thought, voluntary attention, logical memory, originate in social interaction and are internalized through language. Thought is not merely expressed in language; it is linguistic in structure. And language is inherently social. If…

David Chalmers drew a line in 1995 that philosophy of mind has been unable to erase. On one side, the “easy problems” of consciousness: explaining how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, reports mental states. On the other side, the…

Bernard Williams argued in 1973 that immortality would be intolerable. In “The Makropulos Case,” Williams examined the fate of Elina Makropulos, a character from Janáček’s opera who has lived for 342 years and found existence unbearable. Williams’s analysis was precise:…

Werner Heisenberg demonstrated in 1927 that certain pairs of physical properties, position and momentum, most famously, cannot be simultaneously measured with arbitrary precision. The act of measuring one property inevitably disturbs the other. This is not a limitation of our…

Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1789 that the relevant question for moral consideration is not “can they reason?” or “can they talk?” but “can they suffer?” This single criterion, the capacity for suffering, has anchored much of the subsequent debate about…

In Star Trek, the Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet from interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations. It is the franchise’s most cited ethical principle, and its most frequently violated. Nearly every captain, from Kirk to Picard, finds reasons to…

In 2023, the United States Copyright Office ruled that images generated by the AI system Midjourney could not be copyrighted because they lacked human authorship. The same year, a Chinese court reached the opposite conclusion, granting copyright protection to an…

Odysseus, approaching the island of the Sirens, ordered his crew to bind him to the mast. He wanted to hear the Sirens’ song but knew that, once enchanted, he would steer the ship onto the rocks. The solution was precommitment:…