We often hear the claim that experience shapes perspective. This ideology, especially in the context of traditional societies, is often treated as a comforting truism. Many of us even falls for it without questioning whether perspective also shapes experience. It is true that prior experience filters present interpretation. A person raised despite conflict may read…
One of the most enduring meditations on wealth was set not in a modern city of glass and steel, but in Babylon, a city of dust and rivers, long returned to the earth. George S. Clason could have written a manual. Instead, he wrote something closer to a fable. And in doing so, he stumbled…
Most people who pick up Plato’s Republic expect philosophy. What they get in the first book is something closer to a bar argument. Socrates walks into a room, gets pulled into a conversation he didn’t ask for, and ends up in a war of ideas with three very different men. Plato designed Book I as…
To think is to command yourself. But how can one command self without the foundations of thinking and understanding? This is one of the key questions that I ask myself all the time. Here, I want to address it, in my own way of thinking, especially by focusing on the sovereign power of philosophical thought…
The phrase “the blonde beast” comes from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and it appears most notably in his book On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche used “the blonde beast” to describe a type of human being, not a race or ethnicity. He was pointing most basically to a powerful, instinct-driven individual- someone who lives…
The Greek historian Thucydides is widely regarded as one of the earliest thinkers to explore the nature of power not as an abstract idea but as a lived and shaping force in human life. His classic work “History of the Peloponnesian War” is not only a record of conflict between Athens and Sparta but also…
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir To speak of women and the forms of knowledge they carry is to move beyond the visible markers of achievement and into a quieter, often unarticulated domain of intelligence, one that is not always codified in institutions yet persistently shapes them from within….
Most evil is done by people who never make up their minds. Hannah Arendt To speak of thinking as a public duty is to move beyond the comforting illusion that thought belongs to the private sphere, to moments of solitude, reflection, or intellectual leisure, and instead to recognize that thinking is inseparable from the conditions…
What do we do when the machine learns faster than we do? Fight or Flight? The anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence is often framed in dramatic terms, as though the central question were whether machines will replace us entirely. This framing is misleading. The more pressing question is not whether AI will become human, but whether…
In an age of noise, speed, and reaction, I return to writing as a discipline. I am most fascinated by writing for the sake of clarity, but also for pleasure. Since I was 12, I have made myself a hub of miscellaneous ideas, mostly those that shape me and you from an early age passed…