Don’t Take Life So Seriously: Montaigne’s Life Lessons

My dad was an unhappy man. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. By the time his health really started failing, his arthritis so bad he could no longer get out of bed, his condition became all he …

Ye shall do this, ye shall do that: Making sense of Passover (from a non-Jewish point of view)

This article originally appeared at The Jerusalem Post.  A long green cloud appears in the night sky and hovers next to the moon. It then breaks into witch-like fingers and descends to earth. I’ll never forget that scene, as well as the eerie music accompanying it. It comes from the classic 1956 film The Ten …

Your Only Failure Is Your Utter Lack of Culture: Eight Life Lessons from Anton Chekhov’s Letter to His Brother

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture.

Hey Parents: Let Your Children Be Radical Novelties!

In “Becoming Parents to Ourselves” Eldar Sarajlic, an assistant professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, offers some words of wisdom on parenthood. Although he gets stuck in the weeds at some point and assumes that our personal identities are built on rational reflections (when they are also built on chance or …

The Philosophy of The Filthy, Excessive and Unclean

Philosophers don’t often discuss filth and all its disgusting variations, but investigating the unclean turns out to be as useful an exercise as examining the highest ideals of justice, morality and metaphysics.

(M)Existentialism: The Habitat of Emilio Uranga’s Thinking

Emilio Uranga (1921-1988) articulates what we could call Existentialism “a la Mexicana”, Mexican existentialism, or (M)existentialism...It does not escape Mexican philosophers that a thinking of totality, a thinking that transcends contingency and place, has been the hallmark of philosophy since it’s naming by the Greeks.

Emotivism: A Minimalist Conceptual Graphic from Philographics

Emotivism: The assertion that all individual ethical judgments are purely expressions of one's own attitude intended to change the actions or attitudes of others.

Eclecticism: A Minimalist Conceptual Graphic from Philographics

Eclecticism: A conceptual approach that does not stick to a single paradigm or set of assumptions, but instead draws upon multiple theories or styles to gain a more varied or balanced insight into something.