Sublime

Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were literally our natural habitat—our environment. From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fund

Yale sociologist Philip Gorski recently wrote of the “failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life . . . that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating.” He notes that there are two main theories put forward by social scientists to explain morality without recourse to religion. First there are

This paradox of comprehension was articulated explicitly by a great physicist of an earlier age: “Sir Isaac Newton, when asked what he thought of the infatuations of the people, answered that he could calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude” (quoted from The Church of England Quarterly Review, 1850).

This journey of finding a meaningful alignment with ourselves and the world is not an easy one. To gain more clarity and understanding in this domain, I usually encourage people to explore the work of James Hollis. His book Living An Examined Life is a great start and full of meaningful contemplation that is sure to bring more clarity to the journe

Accounts by philosophers Ilhan Inan and Lani Watson, for example, characterize curiosity as an individual motivation to find out a specific referent or to acquire certain epistemic goods, respectively.