Philosopher

Yuan Thompson and her husband have been together since 2008, and while at first she believed they could be soulmates — they had that initial spark, anyway — she says it was dedication and tough work that made them a lasting couple."We definitely enjoyed each other when we first met. We had a super-fun summer, so we decided to stay in touch after that. But honestly, it took seven years of long-distance relationship and lots of hard work for us to eventually be together," Thompson, 38, told CBC News from Ottawa."We all have…

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.Shift workers sleeping at erratic hours. Students pulling all-nighters. Menopausal women tossing and turning in bed from hot flashes.There are a host of reasons why people have periods of poor sleep. And anyone who's endured back-to-back nights of sub-par slumber likely knows the result: Feelings of brain fog,…

In the fall of 2022, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s most famous and polarizing public intellectuals, traveled to Ukraine for a series of visits along the fault lines of the Russian invasion. He witnessed bombed-out apartment buildings in Kyiv, where he had once met with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and where civilians were still liable to be awakened in the night by Russian blasts. He accompanied miners deep into the earth in Pavlograd, toured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, joined the Ukrainian navy…

My high school teacher often claimed that everyone should study Philosophy.She disagreed with the mainstream vision of Philosophy as a pointless divertissement reserved for out-of-touch and entitled elites or just as a boring discipline from academia, too abstract to be appreciated by street-smart laymen.All in all, she continued, anyone is a potential philosopher because all we need to practice it is already inside ourselves: a rational mind and a genuine curiosity towards the universe we inhabit.In other words, she saw…

David ChalmersInstead, Chalmers decided to approach the whole matter as a formal inquiry in scholarly fashion. "You know, what actually is or might be the evidence in favor of consciousness in a large language model, and what might be the evidence against this?" he put to the audience.(Chalmers considers the two terms "conscious" and "sentient" to be "roughly equivalent," at least for the purpose of scientific and philosophical exploration.)Chalmers's inquiry was also, he said, a project to find possible paths to…

Perhaps because Javier Marías felt deeply the absurdity of everyday life and had the sense that history is a game played out with dreadful consequences, he became interested in two pursuits that echo our witless absurdity: the art of spying and the craft of writing fiction. Of the first he became a canny investigator and observer, of the second a talented practitioner. Fifteen novels and several collections of short stories testify to these two lifelong interests, and his success can be measured in the enthusiasm of the…

Breadcrumb Trail Links News Canada The idea is that the colloquial descriptions people use to describe pain sensations could be linked reliably to the words and concepts doctors use to describe pain, like somatic or neuropathic, acute or chronic Philosopher Rachel Katz is developing an ontology of pain to bridge patient descriptions with medical concepts. Photo by Deb Ransom / Ottawa Sun Article content In the long-running annual series Oh, The Humanities! the National Post surveys academic…

'Existence precedes essence,' that is how Sartre had defined the concept of existentialism. According to the French philosopher, only by existing and acting in a certain way do we give meaning to our lives. Born on June 21, 1905, Sartre's early work focused on themes of existentialism as portrayed in his novel and subsequently in the essay Existentialism and Humanism. Sartre would subsequently go on to explore the meaning of freedom and free will, famously stating, "Man is condemned to be free; because once…