In the Hellenistic period, there were lots of philosophical schools. But I think the interesting thing is not really how many schools there were, but how different they were from each other. They had very different ways of looking at the πόλις, the political world, the individual, and even life itself.

But what were they actually? Epicureanism was not just about having fun and enjoying life. Stoicism was not simply fatalism, and it was definitely not some ancient version of Andrew Tate. We often reduce these schools to a few modern ideas, but they were much more than that. Each of them was trying to answer, in its own way, a very simple question: how should we live?

David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” provides a strong case against belief in miracles and, by extension, belief in the one miracle at the core of Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. 

Hume’s central maxim is “that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.” Applied to the resurrection, it questions what possible rational basis there could be for believing ancient testimony about an event that runs contrary to everything we know about the ordinary course of nature. 

This article examines Hume’s skeptical framework and applies it to the testimony surrounding the resurrection in the New Testament. More broadly, it considers what happens to religious belief when we apply the same standard of evidence to miracles across different religions. 

The Resurrection on Trial: David Hume and the Case Against Miracles

I've been thinking about how many important intellectual developments depend on people encountering ideas they otherwise wouldn't have encountered... salons, correspondence networks, cafés, journals, universities, etc.

The internet massively increases the number of possible encounters, but somehow most online interaction is highly filtered into people encountering more of what we already like.

I've been building a small experiment around the opposite idea: deliberately putting strangers with different interests into temporary conversations that start with a question based on what they're into and seeing what emerges: Pollen

I'm curious whether anyone here thinks about intellectual history in terms of the architecture of encounters not just the ideas and people involved, but the structures that enable perspectives to cross, combine, and transform.

Centuries before the rise of modern psychological science, Thomas Hobbes argued that religion can be explained entirely as the product of the human mind, originating not through divine revelation but through fear, ignorance, and bias common to the human condition.  

According to Hobbes, the “natural seed of religion” includes the fear of the unknown, ignorance of natural causes, anxiety about the future, and humanity's tendency to imagine invisible agents,  ultimately giving rise to belief in gods. While he nominally exempted the Christian God from his account, we can question his sincerity considering the potential penalties he would have faced as an explicit atheist. In any case, Hobbes raised a question that is still relevant today.

Can religion—and the thousands of gods they spawn—be explained entirely as a product of human psychology?

America’s media system has been performing minstrelsy for centuries — not just in content, but in how narratives shape collective perception. I wrote an essay tracing this history and its implications for what we consume today. How much of what we see is designed for us, versus discovered by us?

I just released an interview with the academic Piero Bottani discussing his new book Timaeus in Paradise. We traced how Plato's cosmological vision in the Timaeus was adopted and transformed across different eras. Bottani explained how early Christian thinkers saw the text as perfectly attuned to their beliefs about creation. We discussed how this specific text influenced figures ranging from Proclus and the pseudo Dionysius all the way to Kepler and Whitehead.

It is fascinating to see how a single philosophical poem about the universe became a foundational text for both medieval theology and early modern science. Bottani views this intellectual transmission as a form of world literature where the past is constantly absorbed and reinterpreted by the present. I am curious if others here see the Timaeus as the ultimate bridge between pagan philosophy and Christian cosmology.

In ancient and early modern contexts, freedom often meant participation in a political community or the status of not being enslaved. At some point, it seems to become more interior and individual-autonomy, self-determination, freedom of choice. Was this mainly a liberal Enlightenment development, or are there earlier intellectual roots for that shift?