The Marginalian
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Search results for “ethics”

Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics
Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics

“The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

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The Ethics of Belief: The Great English Mathematician and Philosopher William Kingdon Clifford on the Discipline of Doubt and How We Can Trust a Truth
The Ethics of Belief: The Great English Mathematician and Philosopher William Kingdon Clifford on the Discipline of Doubt and How We Can Trust a Truth

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

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John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism
John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism

“Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban.”

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The Ever-Present Origin: Swiss Poet, Philosopher, and Linguist Jean Gebser’s Prescient 1949 Vision for the Evolution of Consciousness
The Ever-Present Origin: Swiss Poet, Philosopher, and Linguist Jean Gebser’s Prescient 1949 Vision for the Evolution of Consciousness

“Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time… not just the ‘now’… or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal.”

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A Fuller Picture of Human Personality: Iris Murdoch on How Art Helps Us Reimagine Freedom, Moral Life, and Our Inner Worlds
A Fuller Picture of Human Personality: Iris Murdoch on How Art Helps Us Reimagine Freedom, Moral Life, and Our Inner Worlds

“The connection between art and the moral life has languished because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself… We need a new vocabulary of attention.”

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200 Years of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece as a Lens on Today’s Most Pressing Questions of Science, Ethics, and Human Creativity
200 Years of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece as a Lens on Today’s Most Pressing Questions of Science, Ethics, and Human Creativity

“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.”

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19th-Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer Presages the Economics and Ethics of the Web and Modern Publishing
19th-Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer Presages the Economics and Ethics of the Web and Modern Publishing

A 19th-century critique of the moral failures of linkbait, cat slideshows, and needless pagination.

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The Rigor of Angels: Human Nature and the Nature of Reality
The Rigor of Angels: Human Nature and the Nature of Reality

“What we are striving for lies inside us; we find ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves.”

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The Psychology of Social Rule: Pioneering Sociologist Elsie Clews Parsons’s Prophetic Century-Old Study of Power, the Rise of Divisiveness, and Why We Classify Ourselves and Others
The Psychology of Social Rule: Pioneering Sociologist Elsie Clews Parsons’s Prophetic Century-Old Study of Power, the Rise of Divisiveness, and Why We Classify Ourselves and Others

“Classification is nine-tenths of subjection.”

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The Conflicted Love Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller: How an Intense Unclassifiable Relationship Shaped the History of Modern Thought
The Conflicted Love Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller: How an Intense Unclassifiable Relationship Shaped the History of Modern Thought

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

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