The Philosophers Hiding Inside Our Dystopian Films
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Foucault never watched The Matrix or The Hunger Games, but their ideas about power still explain what happens on screen.
Philosophy
Raskolnikov, Oldboy, and the Prison You Build Yourself
Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov and Oldboy's Oh Dae-su are locked up in very different ways, but both show that freedom means facing…
Nietzsche’s Case That Bad Philosophy Is Often Fatigue
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues the mind is a servant of the body, and that gloomy philosophies are often symptoms of…
Gaston Bachelard’s Case for the Honesty of Daydreaming
Gaston Bachelard argued that drifting off while watching fire isn't wasted time but the mind's most honest language, explored in The Psychoanalysis…
Fringe and the Price of Knowing Too Much
Fringe uses parallel universes to ask real philosophical questions: Nietzsche's will to knowledge, Kierkegaard's divided self, and Foucault's power and truth.
What Assassin’s Creed Owes to Sartre’s Idea of Freedom
The real history of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Nizaris behind Assassin's Creed, and how its 'nothing is true' creed echoes Sartre's Being…
Why Unfinished Things Outlast What’s Complete
Sartre, Kafka, and Michelangelo's Non-Finito sculptures make the same case: a finished work closes as a possibility, but what's left open keeps…
Solitude Isn’t Lack — It’s the Highest Form of Freedom
Being alone isn't a lack to escape — it may be the one state where you answer to no one. On the…
From Turing’s Question to the Age of Machine Learning
Tracing artificial intelligence from Aristotle's logic and Turing's famous question through the Dartmouth Workshop and the AI winter that followed.