Max Planck, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics: “New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organised, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.” (Source: Max […]

A hypothesis about the strange Left-Islamist alliance — both of them marching together to support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Ayatollahs, and both hostile to USA, Israel, the West more broadly. Drawing upon two perceptive analysts, Friedrich Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill: * Nietzsche in 1887: “the truly great haters in world history have always been

Lecture 8. The Meaning of It All In our eighth and final lecture, we explore the philosophical debate between determinism and free will, examining whether human actions are governed entirely by causal forces or whether genuine volition exists. We consider biological, environmental, and divine forms of determinism, which argue that all actions are predetermined, alongside

“In a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” Source: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Chapter 11. Pictured: The original three rulers of

Lecture 7. The Human Being In lecture seven, we study three philosophical approaches to human nature: dualism (humans as body and non-physical soul), reductive materialism (psychological phenomena as physical byproducts), and integrationism (mind as an emergent property of complex systems). We explore key arguments, including dualism’s interaction problem, materialism’s limits in explaining psychology, and integrationism’s

David Pratt’s summary article at Psychology Today has good advice for anyone, even if one does not plan on winning a Nobel Prize. 1. Find your passion. 2. Develop intellectual independence. 3. Take risks. 4. Find kindred spirits. 5. Work with passion. Lots of well-chosen examples and anecdotes. The whole book is available at Amazon.

Lecture 6. What is Faith? In Lecture Six, we consider “What is faith?” viewing it as both a noun and, more importantly, a verb. We examine six philosophical accounts of faith through parables, including Flew’s gardener (faith as hypothesis modification), Hare’s paranoid roommate (faith as reinterpreting evidence), and Mitchell’s resistance fighter (faith as personal, feeling-based