All posts tagged: plato

AI finds 44 star systems that could hide Earth-like planets

AI finds 44 star systems that could hide Earth-like planets

Published by Jenni Sidey

A machine-learning model identified 44 known planetary systems that could contain undiscovered Earth-like planets. Tests reached up to 99% precision on simulated systems, but telescope observations have not confirmed the predicted planets. The approach uses the arrangement of known planets to help astronomers select promising targets for further searches. A planet already found around a distant star may offer clues about another world still hidden nearby. Its mass and orbit can carry traces of how the entire planetary system formed, including planets too small or faint for telescopes to detect. The model reached precision scores of up to 99% when tested on simulated planetary systems. That result measures performance within a computer-generated population. The predicted worlds around actual stars remain unconfirmed, and the method’s value will depend on follow-up observations. The bee swarm plot ranks seven features by importance, with SHAP values showing how strongly each feature influences individual predictions. (CREDIT: Jeanne Davoult et al, Astronomy & Astrophysics) Reading the arrangement of planets Planets form together within disks of gas and solid material surrounding young …

Navel Gazing Lawyers and Philosopher-Judges: A Tale of (At Least Two) Personhoods

Navel Gazing Lawyers and Philosopher-Judges: A Tale of (At Least Two) Personhoods

Published by Jenni Sidey

In the past two few years, the Supreme Court of the United States has handed down two decisions that rest upon the same fundamental assumption, which is that the American ideal of equality has been achieved. In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization majority decision, Justice Alito asserted that pregnancy discrimination laws have effectively assured equal protection for pregnant people, and even went so far as to equate the decision in Roe v. Wade with Plessy v. Ferguson (the 1896 case that upheld the constitutionality of segregation) in its dismissal of the democratic process. More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the case which upheld Louisiana’s plan to redraw voting districts, Justice Roberts declared that racism has been overcome in America to such an extent that to continue the intent of the Voting Rights Act is itself a violation of equal protection.   I am originally from Louisiana and reflect upon the topography of my home state in my chapter in the recently published book I co-edited with Wesley Barker, titled Thresholds of Irigaray, Relation …

Cicero’s New Leadership and the Question of Good Leadership: How Virtue Ethics is Changing Leadership Studies

Cicero’s New Leadership and the Question of Good Leadership: How Virtue Ethics is Changing Leadership Studies

Published by Jenni Sidey

What matters most in leadership? The question has invigorated thinkers from the origins of philosophy—think Plato’s philosopher-kings, Xenophon’s Cyrus, or Mengzi’s enlightened rulers—to today’s most influential scholars of leadership (and pretty much everyone in between). Since the 1970’s, an influential movement in leadership and management theory, drawing on the groundbreaking work of psychologists David McClelland and Richard Boyatzis, has emphasized the critical role of competence in clarifying what makes for good, effective leadership. Relevant skills and tasks can be organized according to job- and role-specific competencies for managing and leading groups of individuals toward desired ends; emotional intelligence has emerged as a popular candidate for categorizing core leadership competencies. Almost concurrent with this rise in emphasis on competence in leadership, however, has been renewed focus and emphasis on the moral and ethical dimensions of leadership. James MacGregor Burns, held by many to be the founder of contemporary Leadership Studies, argued in 1978 in a seminal text that truly transformational leadership “occurs when [leaders and followers] raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation” …

Is AI really ‘writing’? From a priestess to philosophers, ancient authors would have said ‘no’

Is AI really ‘writing’? From a priestess to philosophers, ancient authors would have said ‘no’

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — I teach writing and rhetoric, but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing? And can artificial intelligence really do it? Many people think of “writing” as putting words on a page. However, even from very early on, writers have seen their craft as something more. From Enheduanna, the first named author on record, to Plato and Aristotle, writing has been portrayed and defined in ways that suggest AI may not be “writing” at all. If not, what should we call AI text? ChatGPT and I have an idea. Praising and pleading Enheduanna, who lived around 2,300 B.C.E., was a powerful princess, priestess and poet of the Akkadian Empire, in what is now Iraq. She has been celebrated as the earliest known writer, though the authorship of her poems and hymns is debated. One of her poems, “The Exaltation of Inanna,” reveals a sense of what writing is and does – portraying it as a living medium that expresses experience and shapes the future. First, the …

The heartbreaking story of Diff’rent Strokes star and 70s & 80s icon Dana Plato

The heartbreaking story of Diff’rent Strokes star and 70s & 80s icon Dana Plato

Published by Daniella Wilson

Dana Plato was one of the major teen idols of the 1970s and 1980s, with major roles in the likes of Diff’rent Strokes, California Suite and Return to Boggy Creek. Her acting abilities were widely recognised, and the star earned Young Artist Award nominations, but behind closed doors, Dana ended up living a troubled life. The star was addicted to drugs and alcohol from a young age, had money left to her by her late mother stolen by a fraudulent accountant, and at her lowest point, she even robbed a convenience store. Here’s what happened to one of Hollywood’s brightest talents… © Getty ImagesDana was a promising young actress Dana’s tragic story As a teenager, Dana ended up taking drugs and drinking alcohol, with the star regularly taking cannabis and cocaine, and reportedly overdosing on Valium when she was just 14 years of age. At 15, she started showing up on the set of Diff’rent Strokes drunk, with the show’s creative supervisor Al Burton recalling: “She would show up in a daze, in a funk.” Although …

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Why Plato Matters Now

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Why Plato Matters Now

Published by Jenni Sidey

Angie Hobbs is Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Sheffield. A leading scholar of ancient philosophy and its contemporary relevance, she is the author of Plato and the Hero and, most recently, Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025). Alongside her academic work, she engages widely with public and policy audiences—contributing frequently to radio and television, including a record 27 appearances on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4, and speaking at venues ranging from the World Economic Forum to the U.K. Parliament. In this interview, Hobbs discusses how Plato’s dialogues illuminate urgent contemporary questions about democracy, flourishing, education, love, and resilience—and why Plato’s voice remains indispensable today. What is your work about? In each chapter of Why Plato Matters Now, I take a topic of pressing contemporary relevance and explore how Plato’s arguments, concepts, and methodology can illuminate it: dialogue and the dialogue form; the nature of a flourishing life; democracy, demagoguery, and tyranny; how communities are built and destroyed; heroism and celebrity and what money can and cannot …

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher

Published by José Betancourt

Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market. (This was when Plato was awake, which was more and more seldom due to the rolling blackouts.) Every classroom had a Plato in it—that had been Melania Trump’s vision. Plato was a humanoid-robot instructor powered by AI, the only kind of instructor our school had had for as long as any of us could remember. Except for Gregory, the Oldest Student. Gregory had been here for more …

Plato and the Metaverse: The Allegory of the Cave 2.0

Plato and the Metaverse: The Allegory of the Cave 2.0

Published by Sam Flores

  Consider being stuck in a cave for your entire existence, where all you see are shadows dancing on a wall, and believe that’s all there is. This was a thought experiment proposed by Plato more than 2,000 years ago. If we turn our minds to the current day, we can see that this allegory is more relevant than ever before, only in the digital space. Are we stuck in the cave of the metaverse, and do we really want to get out of it? Or are we just making our shiny new caves more addictive?   What Was Plato’s Cave All About? Plato’s Cave, Jan Pietersz Saenredam after Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, 1604. Source: The National Gallery of Art   First, to understand how Plato’s theory applies to us today, we should start with an analysis of what the Allegory of the Cave means. It is one of the most famous philosophical “tales.”   Plato describes a hypothetical situation: imagine that you and others have been imprisoned inside a cave since you were born. When you turn your …

The 10 Enduring Ideas of Plato That Still Shape Our World

The 10 Enduring Ideas of Plato That Still Shape Our World

Published by Sam Flores

Published: Feb 27, 2026written by Michael Arnold, BA Art History, MA Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York   If the concerns of Classical Greek philosophy could be reduced to three words, they would be truth, beauty, and goodness. To contemplate these ideals with sincerity is to approach what Plato believed to be the intelligent order behind the universe, a realm the human soul is meant to rediscover.   A disciple of Socrates, Plato developed ideas that gave birth to Platonism and later Neoplatonism. These traditions shaped early Christian thinkers such as St. Augustine and influenced Western thought for centuries. Plato and Socrates were concerned with The Good, The Beautiful, truth, justice, the higher self, and the nature of the soul. These themes appear throughout the Socratic dialogues.   In The Republic, Plato discusses the organization of states, but he begins with the interior life of the human soul, linking the harmony of the individual to that of society. Above all, he emphasizes the …

How MAGA’s anti-empathy campaign upends Christian morality

How MAGA’s anti-empathy campaign upends Christian morality

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Elon Musk, a massive donor to President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and a key player early in the second Trump administration, told Joe Rogan last year, as he was DOGE-ing the federal government, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” More cryptically, he added, “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.” Musk seemed to be saying that empathy can go so far that our own good becomes obscured to the point that we favor the good of someone else. Empathy, at any rate, is not only weakness but dangerous. Since then, empathy has become a dirty word in MAGA circles.  Psychologists define empathy as “understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own.” It is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, understand them the way they understand themselves. The good news is that empathy is a habit we all possess to one degree or another, though one’s empathy seems to correlate more and more with where an American finds themselves on the political spectrum. …