Showing results for "Graham Mack" in Philosophy

Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. We desperately want certainty, but it is out of reach.

The Book of Nothing is a large gathering of quotes and questions that were painstakingly pulled from live satsangs by my dear friend, the late Gordon Goodman, MD. He spent an entire year pulling out helpful quotes and questions from my responses to students during our live, online Sunday Satsangs. It is a book you can read forward, backward, or start anywhere you like. You can listen to one quote or question at a time, or all 624 of them one after the other. Do as you will: It's Your book! And it's my hope that You'll come to recognize this as You go through it.

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach. The focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form.

Ancient Romans liked money. But how did they make a living and sometimes even become rich? The Roman economy was dominated by agriculture, but it was surprisingly modern in many ways: the Romans had companies with CEOs, shareholders, and detailed contracts regulated by meticulous laws; systems of banking and taxation; and a wide range of occupations, from merchant and doctor to architect and teacher. How to Make Money gathers a wide variety of ancient writings that show how Romans thought about, made, invested, spent, lost, and gave away money.