Authors: Julie Posetti, Director of the Information Integrity Initiative, a project of TheNerve/Professor of Journalism, Chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy, City St George’s, University of London; Kaylee Williams, PhD Candidate, Journalism and Online Harm, Columbia University, and Lea Hellmueller, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research, City St George’s, University of London […]
As we saw in our last entry, we must grant Gabriel that he does not conceive of the spirit and spiritual as an “immortal soul” or any similar ghostlike entity, but rather as something grounded in human thought—more specifically, in what relates to norms, values, laws, institutions, and rules of various kinds (I Am Not […]
The expansion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) such as that offered by ChatGPT has multiplied the amount of content available very easily and quickly. In this scenario, two skills become decisive for safe and effective use: critical thinking—the ability to analyze and evaluate information—and media literacy—knowing how to locate, evaluate, and produce information responsibly. A […]
Anthropology • Archaeology • Ecology • Environment • Genetics
Author: Gerlinde Bigga, Scientific Coordinator of the Leibniz Science Campus “Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen”, University of Tübingen The last two decades have seen a revolution in scientists’ ability to reconstruct the past. This has been made possible through technological advances in the way DNA is extracted from ancient bones and analysed. These advances have revealed […]
In the our last entry, we saw the weakness of Gabriel’s ‘inism’ (the belief that to exist has to be identical to ‘exist in something’) as the most important logical fault of his ontology. We also saw that his idea that ‘the world’ (in the sense of a super-entity comprising the totality of real beings) […]
Authors: Jacob L. Bongers, Tom Austen Brown Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sydney and Charles Stanish, Exec. Director, Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment; Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida In 1931, geologist Robert Shippee and US Navy Lieutenant George R. Johnson led one of the first aerial photography expeditions […]
Author: Gabriela Radulescu, Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution As humans began to explore outer space in the latter half of the 20th century, radio waves proved a powerful tool. Scientists could send out radio waves to communicate with satellites, rockets and other spacecraft, and use radio telescopes to take in radio waves emitted by objects […]
The main ontological thesis of the German philosopher Markus Gabriel could be summed up in the phrase: “the Whole does not exist, but everything exists.” If we replace “the Whole” with a more familiar word (“the world”), the first part of the thesis amounts to the striking claim that “the world does not exist”—a phrase […]
Author: Anthony Booker, Reader in Ethnopharmacology, University of Westminster “Double double toil and trouble” is a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that conjures images of evil witches making potions in giant cauldrons. But the truth was that women persecuted as witches were probably legitimate healers of the time. Prior to the 14th century, female healers were […]
If you’ve ever fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole—clicking link after link until you’re far from where you started—you’ve explored a network, much like physicists map connections in systems like the internet or ecosystems. Each Wikipedia article is a dot, each hyperlink a line connecting ideas. This vast web, built by millions of contributors, mirrors […]