Author: Tom Siegfried / Source: Science News Long before there was a periodic table of the elements, there was no need for a table — just four chairs. From ancient through medieval into early modern times, natural philosophers could count the known elements with the fingers of only one hand

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings Nietzsche saw dreams as an evolutionary time machine for the human mind. Dostoyevsky discovered the meaning of life in one. Mendeleev invented his periodic table in another. Neil Gaiman dreamt his way to a philosophical parable of identity. We are

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote as she drew on her intimate enchantment with the Highlands in her masterpiece The Living Mountain. Having grown

Author: Julian Baggini / Source: Big Think Our culture has its own mistaken assumption: that the individual is an autonomous human intellect independent from the social environment. Admiring the great thinkers of the past has become morally hazardous. Praise Immanuel Kant, and you might be

Source: Big Think The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher” – at the entrance to the New York City subway at 57th and 8th – were perhaps random but inevitable. I’d been a “public philosopher” for 15 years, so I readily agreed to