Democrats’ complacency and the overturning of “Roe v. Wade” — Reportedly, thanks to President Trump’s trio of conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, the US is set to overturn its federal protection of a woman’s right to abort her fetus, a protection granted under 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision. …

Disposing of some fake-philosophical self-help ads for the happiness industry — I’ve found a galling adversary. His name’s Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀and he, too, writes relatively philosophical articles. These he posts on two publications he runs, “The Philosophical Inn” and “The Writers Fight Club.” There are two key differences, though, between his work and mine. First, his is more financially successful, judging…

And the New Testament’s Orwellian Temerity — Although I don’t subscribe to the theistic basis of Judaism, and I don’t practice many of the Jewish customs in an orthodox fashion, my parents are Jewish and I grew up in a Reform (largely secularized) Jewish household, meaning that we celebrated the High Holidays, and I went to Hebrew…

How those academic disciplines are unlikely partners in the domestication of the wilderness — Decades before the more familiar American culture war between the polarized tribes of the so-called smug, cheese-eating elites and the basket of MAGA deplorables, there was a more rarefied cultural conflict that simmered in the Ivory Tower. In 1959 CP Snow called the sciences and the arts “the two cultures,”…

Sorting through spiritual charlatanry, self-delusion, alienation, and Neoplatonism — In a revealing interview, the cognitive scientific guru John Vervaeke summarizes his views on how wisdom can free us from “the meaning crisis.” He thinks that the modern world has gone wrong with its construal of rationality as the logical manipulation of statements. Wisdom is a broader capacity for connecting…

The paradoxes and horrors at the root of the numinous — What is nature’s character, the overall, informed sense of the outer wilderness? Science models how natural systems work, and what we should expect to unfold, causally speaking, from certain initial conditions. But is there an aggregate of traits that forms the nature of nature, as it were, and if so…

The mystery of why these political cults arose almost simultaneously in the United States — Why did two insane cults arise on the opposite sides of the American cultural spectrum, at roughly the same time, namely the cults of Trumpism and Wokeness? Is this some reverse Axial Age effect? The Axial Age of the first millennium BCE was the dawning of spiritual or existential revelations…

And the unavoidable path from atheism to pantheism — There’s an illuminating exchange between the physicist Paul Davies and a bevy of other scientists at Edge, from 2007. Davies had argued in the NY Times that the mainstream scientific conception of natural laws is faith-based and has even derived from early modern deism. The status of natural laws Scientists presume, says Davies, “that the…

The hierarchy of abstractions and the usefulness of fictions and games — In a video interview, Paul Davies, the theoretical physicist expressed the standard scientific bafflement about the relation between mathematics and natural reality. What we see in our daily life, he said, is so complex that we might have assumed we could never make sense of it all. But beneath that…