What is human life without emotion? Could the “dawn of humankind” even be imagined without emotion exerting its effects right there from the start? And across the millennia emotion has forever been at the heart of most matters. Human history has been shaped by emotion and reshaped by attitudes toward emotion; a powerful human force philosophers and theologians confront and reckon with again and again throughout history and in every culture.… read more »
Placebos “work” for quite a few medical problems. But how? And what is the work they do?
What one thinks a medicine is capable of, one’s idea of that medicine, may affect us in the way “proper” medicines do. This implies that, in observing the work of a placebo we are watching an idea affect biology, the mind moving the body.… read more »
“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
This familiar courtroom oath unpacks some of the subtleties of truth-telling. Making true statements is not all there is to it. What one says may be true, but what is omitted in the telling may present a false picture.… read more »
Schopenhauer described boredom as “a tame longing without any particular object,” Dostoevsky as “ a bestial and indefinable affliction,” and poet Joseph Brodsky as “time’s invasion of your world system.”
Unsurprisingly, not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it, and it is one of the central preoccupations of the age.… read more »
The American poet Ezra Pound proclaimed that “Poetry is news that stays news!” On a different note, his contemporary William Carlos Williams said that “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”… read more »
Is science nearing an answer to the question of how and why consciousness and self-consciousness come about? In attempting to resolve the mystery of sentience, what roles do physics, psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience play? How do various philosophical and religious traditions contribute to our inquiries into this obvious and everyday universal experience?… read more »
Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »
“I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection.”
—Wolfgang Pauli
“Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although…the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena.”… read more »