It may seem strange to try to relate David Hume the empiricist philosopher with the mess we have in health care here in these United States. It may seem strange partly because we don't usually think  philosophers have anything practical to say about anyone's life, nor do we think that long dead...

This is the thirteenth post in an article series about MIT’s lecture course “Introduction to Algorithms.” In this post I will review lectures twenty and twenty-one on parallel algorithms. These lectures cover the basics of multithreaded programming and multithreaded algorithms. Lec...

Richard Nixon watches [transcript] 'All in the Family.'...

Hume believes everyone assumes as true a certain framework for their discussions about themselves and the world around them. These are considered so uncontroversial, that no one disputes them, or sets about trying to defend them. But, then, he saw Descartes trying to question whether these uncontrov...

Why should we pay any attention to old dead philosophers like Descartes or Hume? Is there anything that they said which could educate us about the world today? If there was something important that they could teach us, wouldn't we be reading about it in the newspapers and magazine racks at Safeway? ...

" L’@mateur d’idées – Votre nouveau livre s’intitule Apocalypse [1]. Est-ce à dire que nous approchons de la fin ? Michel Maffesoli – Pas du tout ! J’utilise le mot « apocalypse » dans son sens étymologique premier, qui est d’ailleurs le sens qu’on lui donne en théologie. ...

Une poubelle humaine aurait rendu son dernier souffle il y a déjà belle lurette. Le "boucher de Mathauser" était un lâche, et, après ses crimes, il a, comme tant d'autres criminels nazis, fui l'Europe, avec les complicités que l'on sait. Une justice humaine n'a pas pu...

I've been trying to figure out what to make of James Rachels' book, The Elements of Moral Philosophy. I've come to the chapters wherein he tries to float the idea that morality can be made sense of by looking at either our subjective selves, or the ideas we get from religion, and if that doesn't wor...

Mois après mois, année après année, l'ampleur de la contamination par l'amiante se révèle, puisque des malades nouveaux apparaissent, de nouveaux décès ferment le chapitre de bien des vies qui auront été entièrement vouées à un travail peu rémunérateur et si mauvais pour les s...

The construction of Plato’s Phaedo is compelling enough to present an argument for the immortality of the soul. In it, he recounts the final days of Socrates who has been condemned to death for corrupting youth in Athens. Plato, ironically uses the Socratic method for concluding that the human sou...