During the Axial Age, in the mid-first millennium BCE, some of humanity’s most influential teachers lived, mental horizons in the West, the Middle East, India,
Some historians of thought have called it humanity’s most influential period. The philosopher Carl Jaspers called the time between 800 BCE and 300 BCE the
A recent article here began to explore ways that ideas of truth can vary in different cultures. A common theme I’ve found has been constancy.
What is truth? A common theme in different definitions of it has been constancy. For example the Middle English (spoken from about 1150 to around
The biologist Mae-Wan-Ho, in The Rainbow and the Worm; The Physics of Organisms, wrote that biology has a long tradition of seeing organisms in atomistic
Maps can distort our views of the world. Thongchai Winichakul, in Siam Mapped, wrote that the map of Thailand became a metasign—it acquired meanings that
Many of AI’s leaders are concerned about aligning AI’s goals with what will benefit humanity, but its LLMs have a narrow view of us. Humanity’s
Western scientists in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly conceived space as a void that objects move around in. At the same time, architects were
Just after the beginning of the 20th century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson defined two kinds of time. One is objectively measured. We identify a
What is a circle? Many Westerners have been trained to think of it as an abstract geometric shape with a circumference of 2πr and the