by Tom Amarque

In reality, this conflict and the political polarization is better understood as an internal schism within the long secular afterlife of Christianity itself. (Post-)Modern political conflict does not take place outside the Christian moral-metaphysical inheritance but unfolds within it. Even where explicit belief in God has waned, the underlying grammar continues to structure political imagination and affective intensity. The culture war is therefore not post-Christian; it is a theological civil war conducted with secular concepts and alien-like technology.

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by Justin Carmien

Thirty-five years ago, a conflict raged between religion and science. The public display was especially pronounced in conversations surrounding figures such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.

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by Justin Carmien

I fear that something adult has quietly gone missing from my social experience. I’m not so much worried about a loss of discipline among my friends and colleagues—certainly not authority, nor responsibility—but about something which precludes such virtues and makes them possible.

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 by Justin Carmien

There is a particular jingle which still hums through grocery stores and banks, a faint residue of another world. “Everybody wants to be closer to free.”

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 by Justin Carmien

Five Easy Pieces tells the story of a man drifting between the worlds he inhabits. Jack Nicholson’s character, Bobby Dupea, is caught between expectations, family, and his own sense of self—a narrative of dislocation and rootlessness.

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 by Tom Amarque

My most recent article, “The Art of Willing,” proved interesting largely because of the feedback it generated. In retrospect, it became obvious that I had failed to answer the most fundamental question of all—namely: What is will? I realized that much of the criticism stemmed from this omission. I had committed one of philosophy’s cardinal sins: assuming that everyone uses a given term in the same way I do. So let’s rectify this.

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 by Tom Amarque

It is an interesting fact that will, one of the most basic features of human psychological existence, plays only a minuscule role in contemporary psychology—if it plays any role at all. This is puzzling, because will—understood as a pattern of behaviors oriented toward particular goals—seems to encompass much of what we do in our everyday lives.

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 by Tom Amarque

The question of free will is a mock debate. Let me show you why.

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 by Tom Amarque

Maybe we don’t enter the world at birth. Maybe our life really begins by brushing against surfaces—leaving the amniotic sac of primordial fusion with the mother-womb behind and becoming surfaces ourselves, exposed to other surfaces. Skin onto skin. Our face and lips search for the breast; so much so that this sack of tissue and fat leaves such a deep imprint that it continues to exert its fascination even in the final stages of our life.

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 by Justin Carmien

Indeed, our capacity to empathize is not infinite. Today, images and reports of suffering in the news and on social media fuel an economy of attention.

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Tom Amarque

Call me biased. I am German, and I grew up in the nineties. The world was easy back then.

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Von Matthias Thiele

Die Maschine reagiert nicht strafend auf das Unnütze, sie reagiert lediglich mit den Mechanismen ihres Selbsterhalts. Was nicht empfindlich stört, wird von ihr ignoriert. Was in ihr keine Funktion erfüllt, verblasst allmählich.

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 by Tom Amarque

There is an aphorism by the incomparable Nassim Nicholas Taleb, reminiscent of the wisdom of Don Vito Corleone, that goes like this: Don’t threaten when you are angry.

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 by Tom Amarque

There is a specific perspectival madness when it comes to psyche and consciousness. As recently as 2024 Kuhn listed more than 500 theories of consciousness, all converging, conflicting and contradicting each other, from the resonable to the more absurd. Like when famous physicist Roger Penrose mused that consciousness emerges when the wave-function breaks down. Which is just a fancy new wording for the ancient belief that Shiva himself created the universe.

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 von Renée DiResta

Es gibt einen Krieg. Wir sind mitten in einem sich entwickelnden, anhaltenden Konflikt: einem Informationsweltkrieg, in dem staatliche Akteure, Terroristen und ideologische Extremisten die soziale Infrastruktur des Alltags nutzen, um Zwietracht zu stiften und die gemeinsame Realität zu untergraben.

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