Either the mysterious structures underpinning our rationality are arbitrary and misleading, or—somehow—they broadly work… We are forced to wager that there is something somehow connecting our thoughts with reality. 

Kit Wilson on science, skepticism, and subjective experience

“As the great phenomenologists and theoretical physicists of the mid-twentieth century saw it, then, science simply cannot deny ordinary human experience without ultimately undermining itself.”

Kit Wilson on science and reality

“We must recognize that the post-Cartesian reductive-materialist frameworks will never be sufficient to support a robust and expansive human flourishing.”
M. G. Scott on re-accessing metastructure

“The truly strange thing about quantum mechanics is not the content of the theory: it’s the way that quantum mechanics threatens to upend our fundamental relationship to reality itself.”

M. G. Scott on quantum mechanics and truth.

What can psychology tell us about human flourishing?

Brent Robbins on the Beatitudes as an answer to the problem of evil

Either humanity, and thus each and every human, has dignity in its current state, or it, and by extension we, can never claim to have, or give, dignity.

John P. Slattery offers a genealogy of eugenics

David Morrison offers a scientific deep-dive on networks of change

Do bioethicists actually change minds?

An interview with Michael Deem

This inability to stop engaging in unhealthy, excessive behavior is not unique to the current age.

Helena Vaughan on smartphones as a marker of modernity

How is mathematics a liberal art? How can being good at math translate into virtue?

An interview with Francis Su

The story of rupture is often told by innovative women.

Christine Helmer and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft on “genderealogy”

In making computers to solve ethical dilemmas and robots to enter relationships, are we creating something in our own image? Is it possible to separate intelligence or emotion from the body?

An interview with Noreen Herzfeld

Implicit in this wisdom saying is a sense of the incalculable—that one person is the whole world. This incalculable value transcends the rationalist’s quality of life calculations.

Anthony Shoplik on suffering and meaning in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

There are two questions: ‘Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis?’ and ‘Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?’

Anthony Shoplik on having kids in the age of climate change

We no longer connect with one another over information as often as we used to. Instead, we connect with a broker, a hub, a nexus.

Tom White and Wesley Brandon on substituting systems for people

By demolishing the conflict thesis, the authors have reminded us that if we hope to make true progress, it will require disabusing ourselves of convenient narratives and embracing collaboration between faith and reason.

Zachary Stoltzfus reviews Of Popes and Unicorns

The word “artifice” means handiwork, work of skill. Artificial intelligence is a wondrous work. And yet, if we allow that artifice to define our reality… we may become artifices ourselves, handiwork of our handiworks.

John Dolan and Jordan Wales on AI and us

The meaning of our personhood becomes a necessary object of examination wherever some technology is deeply entwined with our lives, particularly when that technology purports to replicate what we are.

Jordan Wales and John Dolan on AI and us

Stephen Gaukroger exposes the insubstantial reasons for assuming that some meaningful theoretical construct or set of practices called "Science" underpins all the sciences..

Eileen Reeves reviews Civilization and the Culture of Science

The body politic metaphor became proof that the immigrant and the dependent were biologically incompatible with the rest of society. The community that grew out of this interpretation shaped itself in strange, unsettling, and inhumane ways.

G. Marie Aquilina traces the history of eugenics as a distortion of the body politic