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We all hate getting yelled at, especially when we mess up. Fortunately, there’s a solution: logical positivism was a philosophical revolution that introduced a new theory of meaning – one that shook philosophy to its core. Strangely enough, it can also give you a convenient way out of a sticky situation.
About I Hope This Helps
A wise man once said: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Sam Dresser emphatically agrees. In Aeon’s first original web series, he uses arcane philosophical theories to help solve your personal problems. For more advice from Sam, take a look at our originals video channel.
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes