Reading List Smart books for humans on artificial intelligence September 17, 2024 AI鈥檚 involvement in everyday life is ever-evolving, with significant implications for how we work, live, and traverse fields from education to healthcare. As this powerful technology is incorporated into more services and products that we rely upon, here are some books that can help us to embrace human agency and navigate this new digital age. 聽 Read More
Essay Working and investing as an ancient Roman August 03, 2024 Encountering the Romans in the marketplace and observing how they made a living allows us to discover how they negotiated the central questions of civilization. Read More
Essay What鈥檚 Joe Biden鈥檚 role in politics now? July 24, 2024 In April 2020, when Joe Biden had effectively won his party鈥檚 nomination to challenge incumbent US President Donald Trump in the coming election and political commentators had begun to fret about both candidates鈥� ages, I consulted Plutarch of Chaeronea to get his advice about old men engaging in politics. Read More
Essay Ovid鈥檚 38 recommendations for getting over a breakup July 10, 2024 Ever gone through a breakup? You鈥檙e not alone. In the year 1 CE, the Roman poet聽Ovid published a poem titled "Remedies for Love", and it suggests that relationships haven鈥檛 changed much in two thousand years. Read More
Essay Liberalism may be the source of your soul June 14, 2024 The most obvious and important realities can sometimes be the hardest to think and talk about. Read More
Podcast How to Be Queer June 14, 2024 How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. Read More
Essay Why we practice magic April 11, 2024 Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers wrote extensive treatises on the topic. Read More
Podcast How to Be Healthy January 22, 2024 The second-century Greek physician Galen鈥攖he most famous doctor in antiquity after Hippocrates鈥攊s a central figure in Western medicine. Read More
Podcast Listen in: The Weirdness of the World January 22, 2024 Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? Read More
Essay New year, old problems January 10, 2024 The struggle against distraction might seem utterly specific to the twenty-first century, but it was in fact singled out as a crisis more than a millennium and a half ago. Read More
Podcast Chinese Cosmopolitanism January 08, 2024 Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. Read More
Essay Galen and health: Inspiration, caution, and some useful advice January 02, 2024 What use to today鈥檚 physicians is the writing of Galen, an educated but pompous and (we now see, in 2023) misguided healer who lived 1,800 years ago? Read More
Essay Aristotle and ecology October 12, 2023 Aristotle urges us to study animals closely for what they reveal about the larger world around us, including ourselves. Read More
Interview Myisha Cherry on Failures of Forgiveness September 28, 2023 Forgiveness聽is one way at repair. It is not the only way.聽Forgiveness聽can never reach repair by itself. It requires work from community members as well as victims and wrongdoers. Read More
Essay Plato the constitutionalist鈥攁nd the Supreme Court July 27, 2023 A cabal of unelected men and women appointed with tenure for life, making the most important decisions for an entire society with no chance of appeal. That is a good description of the United States Supreme Court. It鈥檚 also a good description of the philosopher-rulers of Plato鈥檚 Republic. Read More
