When you put a bunch of live crabs in a bucket, you can witness quite an interesting phenomenon. Some of these crabs can easily escape – but as they attempt to climb out of the bucket, other crabs pull them back down. At first glance, this can seem like cruel and senseless behaviour: rather than…
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There is undoubtedly a variety of opinion in matters of art appreciation – someone may, for example, detest Damien Hirst’s work but praise Raphael’s, and vice versa. A standard of taste is a criterion by which you can judge art to be praiseworthy or not. This means that opinion holds no authority. There are certain…
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As developments in artificial intelligence (AI) continue, more and more jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots. There are fears that the rise of automation will lead to mass unemployment. In terms of the foreseeable future, it seems that, while some jobs in the future will invariably be better performed by a…
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There are possibly many ways in which we can define a religious experience. We need to ask ourselves: What features should such an experience exemplify? There is also the issue of trying to ascertain whether a certain experience is pathological in nature. For reasons which will become clear, I will be using the term religious…
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Pythagoras was an ancient Greek philosopher who founded Pythagoreanism, a school of thought that is heavily influenced by mathematics and mysticism. The ideas of Pythagoras would prove to be a huge influence on both Aristotle and Plato and, in turn, the development of Western philosophy. Pythagoras (or his movement) is credited with many mathematical and…
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