Debates

To a Western European with a vague knowledge of Italian, “Manipur” automatically associates with “mani pulite” (pure hands), the big anti-corruption campaign in the early 1990s that changed the whole …
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The German socialist August Bebel once commented that antisemitism is the “socialism of fools” because the antisemites recognized capitalist exploitation only if the exploiter happened to be Jewish but who …
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Events and Emergencies

In a recent text, Alain Badiou defines philosophy as “a meditation regarding the existence of truths that result from the event in a given situation of being.”[i] …
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On the first day of my Introduction to Philosophy course, I ask students whether an artificial intelligence can fall in love. Many students believe this to be possible. A sophisticated …
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In the prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt expresses her concerns about the launch of the first man-made satellite—Sputnik—into space. Our excitement about this event “second in importance to …
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The subject of self-consciousness is strewn with intellectual land mines. There is no consensus about what kind of consciousness this is or what it is that we’re conscious of when …
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Since the dawn of the computer age scientists, philosophers, and authors have warned of the day when thinking machines would rival and eventually surpass human intelligence. In the most nightmarish …
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Sometimes I wonder how the last words committed from my hands will eventually read? What will these final words say? Would they be as I imagined it all ending? Or …
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When Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, claimed in the summer of 2022 that AI was “sentient,”[1] thereby heralding the ‘Singularity’ (more on this below),[2] he was roundly denounced as, to …
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The mood, to put it bluntly, is bleak. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine marches into yet another month. Thousands have been killed in the conflict and millions more have …
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