The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a philosophical short story by the sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, originally published in 1973 and then re-republished in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), a collection of Le Guin’s short stories. This particular short story (which you can read here) describes the utopian city of Omelas,…
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The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe is little known to most Anglophone readers. He was greatly inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and has been called one of the “bleakest thinkers of all times and places”. Zapffe was also an avid mountaineer and a friend of fellow Norwegian philosopher – and originator of deep ecology – Arne Næss.…
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Antinatalism is the view that procreation is morally wrong. Its most well-known current defender is David Benatar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Capetown, who explicated this moral position on procreation in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. However, antinatalism long predates Benatar’s work. Antinatalism has…
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A commonly reported feature of the DMT experience is that of impossibility. In the DMT space, one can be left astonished to witness objects, events, and beings that one regards as undeniably impossible. But does impossibility mean exactly in terms of the DMT experience? And are users correct in their apprehension (if that’s possible) of…
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The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995) was a precocious thinker, reading the likes of Diderot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche at the age of 14 (the latter having a major influence on his work). His precociousness was later exemplified by first major philosophical work, On the Heights of Despair, published in 1934, when…
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