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The Daily Philosophy
- Posted on Monday July 13, 2026
Imagine being asked to make a sacrifice for someone you will never meet. Not merely a stranger living in another country, but a person who does not yet exist and may not be born for another hundred years. Most of us would hesitate. Yet this is precisely what sustainability quietly demands. We are told to consume less, preserve resources, and limit environmental damage for future generations. But why should we? What obligations, if any, do the living owe to the unborn? This question becomes more puzzling the more we think about it. Moral obligations usually seem to depend on relationships we can understand; we harm or help people who already exist, who can respond to us, or who share social and political bonds with us. Future generations, however, cannot reciprocate, cannot negotiate, and cannot even be identified as specific individuals. Yet, despite their absence, they appear at the center of ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday July 12, 2026
 When we stand before The Starry Night and feel something we cannot quite name, we tend to attribute it to the painting’s beauty. But there is a harder question lurking behind our aesthetic response: what kind of mind produced this, and does it matter?
Vincent van Gogh painted that churning, electric sky after admitting himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy. He was, at the time, suffering from severe mental distress that has since been variously interpreted through diagnoses including mood disorders, epilepsy, and psychotic episodes. The question this raises is not merely psychological. It is a genuinely philosophical one, and it belongs to one of the oldest debates in aesthetics: Is art the expression of truth, and if so, what kind of mind can access it?
Plato was deeply suspicious of art precisely because he thought it dealt in appearances rather than essences. But there is an irony here. If we take ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Wednesday July 01, 2026
In the freezing darkness of a refrigerated truck in Essex, England, a phone screen emitted its final light. The messages belonged to Tra My, a young Vietnamese woman who had left her impoverished village in search of a better future. Her final words to her mother were painfully simple: “I’m sorry, Mom… I can’t breathe.” In the final moments between life and death, what haunted her most was not only physical suffering, but guilt. She apologized because she believed she had failed in her duty to help her family, failed in her journey abroad, failed in her obligation as a daughter.
Tra My’s story is not merely a tragedy of migration. It is also a tragedy of filial piety.
Across many parts of East Asia, children grow up carrying invisible expectations. In rural villages, families compare themselves to neighbors whose children send money home from overseas. In cities, students abandon interests in ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday June 20, 2026
The tragedy may be less about desire than we assume, and more about origin, order, and the wrong inner position.
Mention Oedipus today and most people think they already know what the story means. Not the plague, not the riddle, not the broken city, not the man who does not know who he is, but one thing: desire. Freud’s reading became so influential that it turned Sophocles' tragedy into a cultural shorthand for forbidden longing.
Freud was not wrong to think that Oedipus still speaks to modern people. He saw, correctly, that the play reaches into something intimate and difficult in human life. Oedipus is not a dead relic from ancient Greece. He remains disturbing because he shows how little a human being may understand about himself until truth arrives too late.
The problem is not that Freud found depth in the myth. It is that his reading may have fixed the center ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday June 13, 2026
Todd May, Should We Go Extinct? A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. Crown, 2024. 176 pages.
Humans are the only species that can both cause and contemplate their own extinction. Our enormous technological and philosophical abilities put us in a unique existential situation – one that informs discussions about whether we are wise enough to keep ourselves in existence. Many of the arrangements of human life are, as everyone knows, self-destructive – and, even if we were better at managing our collective existence, there’s always the risk of natural catastrophes – extinction-level events, pandemics, and so on. There is lots of interesting work on the history and philosophy of human extinction – including a splendid book by Emile P. Torres.
Humans are the only species that can both cause and contemplate their own extinction.
The latest ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday June 06, 2026
On noble shepherds and just rulers
What better way to start this discussion than at the beginning? So let’s go back in time, close to the very roots of Western philosophy, Chapter I from Plato’s Republic. In here, we have Socrates discussing the nature of just rule with a variety of characters.
One of them, Thrasymachus, uses the timeless argument of comparing rulers to shepherds (indeed, it is an insult to this day to call a group of people ‘sheep’). Just as shepherds “seek the good of their sheep and cattle, and fatten them and take care of them” mainly for some kind of profit, so the argument goes, rulers think about their subjects pretty much as sheep and abuse their power for personal gain.
Socrates, being himself, employs a sleight of hand, arguing that taking care of sheep and profiting from them are two different things. A ‘true shepherd’ then, has the ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday May 16, 2026
Public discourse in the post-truth era is shifting from “what happened?” to “who possesses the authority to narrate what happened?” Truth no longer flows solely from evidence; it moves through institutions, media infrastructures, and digital platforms as a sociological process. Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt renders this shift visible through a sexual misconduct allegation at Yale University.
The film begins when Maggie, a graduate student, accuses her professor Hank of sexual assault. Alma Imhoff, Maggie’s advisor and a philosophy professor, informs the administration — at which point a personal complaint transforms into institutional risk management. Testimonies are ambiguous, evidence is inconclusive, and Hank denies the accusation, claiming Maggie weaponized plagiarism allegations into assault charges. The university’s initial impulse is not verification but the protection of protocol and reputation. A private grievance becomes an administrative conflict.
The university’s initial impulse is not verification but the protection of protocol and reputation.
As the investigation unfolds, ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday May 10, 2026
James Romm (2026). Since You’re Mortal…: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. W.W. Norton and Company. 176 pages.
Get it here: Amazon US, publisher’s website. Amazon UK doesn’t seem to have the book yet.
If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!
I was delighted to open James Romm’s little collection of ancient wisdom and immediately be enchanted by the premise of the book, the idea behind it, the selection of sources and sayings, and also the handsome production values that make this book much more than just another scholarly source. And now I’m very happy to show it to you.
The author
James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He specialises in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilisation and is the author of multiple books. His Amazon profile ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday May 03, 2026
In Vietnam, many families and businesses keep a songbird. Housed in ornate bamboo cages, these birds are the centerpieces of a Vietnamese tradition known as chơi chim cảnh (‘playing’ ornamental birds). The birds are often meticulously cared for, fed premium diets of insects and fruit, bathed daily, and protected from the harsh realities of urban predators. If humans provide food, care, and most importantly, safety, does it justify the stripping of a creature’s fundamental autonomy?
Nussbaum proposes the Capabilities Approach. This theory focuses on what one is able to do and be? She argues that every creature has a set of species-specific functions that are essential for it to flourish, to live a life that is worthy of its dignity. While Nussbaum developed this list originally for humans, she extends it to animals, including capabilities such as: “life, health, bodily integrity, affiliation, and practical reason.” (Nussbaum 2006, 2) The tradition excels ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Friday April 24, 2026
 Not many seminal works of philosophy are the product of an unoccupied mind in the midst of a failed mining project, but that, it seems, was the story behind Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics. At the beginning of January 1686, he travelled to the Harz mountains to continue his (ultimately ill-fated) project to improve the productivity of the mines there via wind machines and water pumps of his own invention. When the work stalled for a few days, Leibniz did what he did best: he thought. At the beginning of February 1686, he remarked to a friend that as he had nothing to do for a few days, he had “written a short discourse on metaphysics”, a remark from which the text subsequently derived its name since Leibniz left it untitled. That “short discourse”—never published in his lifetime—would later become one of his most important philosophical works, as it captures the ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday April 13, 2026
On 31st March 2026, the University of Cambridge announced the establishment of a new constituent of the university, the Rokos School of Government. The ‘Rokos’ name was justified by an exceedingly large donation to found the school, a donation made by Chris Rokos, a hedge fund manager. The school is “to equip future leaders to navigate increasingly complex domestic and global political environments in a challenging and rapidly changing world”. It will have the advantage of direct connection with the university’s “recognised expertise in technology and the sciences, together with the social sciences, arts and humanities”.
On hearing of the announcement, many were highly pleased. That could be for a variety of reasons from increased prestige for the university, more employment opportunities and, dare I say, international conference trips — and it is possible that many actively endorse the project’s intended value, namely for future governments and governing. Indeed, in view ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday March 28, 2026
Plato presents Socrates' skepticism toward the written word, and the limits of what can be derived through the process of reading, in the Phaedrus. In this dialogue, Socrates supports his arguments against the written word by relating the myth of Theuth and Thamus, criticizing writing as inert or static. It cannot answer questions, defend itself or adapt to and change the soul of the reader for the better.
Theuth is an Egyptian god (Thoth), credited with inventing many arts: number, calculation, geometry, astronomy and, crucially, writing. He represents technological ingenuity, cleverness and the impulse to improve human life through extrinsic tools. Thamus is an Egyptian king (Ammon), who acts as a judge of these inventions.
When Theuth presents writing, he praises it as a remedy for the limits of memory, claiming it will make people smarter and help them remember knowledge better. Thamus disagrees and argues that writing will actually produce forgetfulness ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday February 09, 2026
Carrara, M., De Florio, C., Lando, G., & Morato, V. (2026). Contemporary Metaphysics. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. 289 pages, 92.05 Euro, 99.99 USD (hardcover); 79.20 USD (Kindle).If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!
An interesting idea and a great table of contents, but the execution is unclear about who the ideal reader is — and will really satisfy nobody.
The Book
There are fundamentally two kinds of reviews. Show me any book on the philosophy of AI, or love, or happiness, and I’ll tell you where the author went wrong, where he cut corners, and where his explanations shine. That’s me as an expert, reading a book and giving my informed opinion. This kind of review can be useful but one thing it cannot do: it can never approach a book in quite the same way as the book’s ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday February 02, 2026
Artificial intelligence is reshaping contemporary life, not because machines are developing minds, but because humans have created tools strong enough to reorganize social reality. AI’s influence comes from its capacity to perform certain tasks with extraordinary efficiency, speed, and scale — often surpassing human performance in narrowly specified domains. Yet this performance rests on a crucial absence: artificial intelligence operates without understanding, experience, or purpose of its own. It exhibits competence without comprehension.
This is not philosophical hair-splitting. It is the key to why AI is simultaneously useful and dangerous. When systems that do not understand the world generate outputs that resemble intelligent judgment, they invite misplaced trust. And when misplaced trust becomes embedded in institutions — courts, hospitals, schools, labor markets, and cultural platforms — it can turn into a new form of unaccountable authority. The challenge posed by AI is therefore not the emergence of autonomous machine minds but ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday January 25, 2026
When we see another being suffer, something happens in us. It is not abstract, not cognitive nor philosophical, it is a visceral feeling which occurs. We feel a discomfort that is not their pain but is definitely related to it. This phenomenon, feeling pain for pain, may be the deepest emotional root of ethics. Before rules, before reason, before social contracts or priests and gods, there has been this simple capacity: the inability to remain emotionally unmoved by another’s suffering once it is perceived and understood.
Perhaps we can even see this mechanism at work in nature. I love watching those videos where hippos intervene when crocodiles attack other animals, often animals the hippo has no reason to care about. A baby gazelle is caught, starts bleating helplessly and shaaaazzaaaaam, a massive hippo charges in, jaws wide open, which sends the crocodile running for cover. This looks as if the hippo ... Continue Reading »
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