All posts tagged: Reflections

Addiction Reflections and Recovery Considerations

Addiction Reflections and Recovery Considerations

Published by Jenni Sidey

Before making any decisions, ultimately and always, any discussion or consideration involving addiction and recovery must begin, continue, and conclude with medical advice. Addiction is a complex and serious circumstance. One point to consider is that the first step toward the road of recovery is the cognitive action of acknowledgment and acceptance (Chen, 2022; Lewis, 2018; Purje, 2014). If acknowledgment and acceptance are not present, denial may become the determining thought, which then may continue with the ongoing addictive behavior. Without the insight of acknowledgment and acceptance of addiction, the process of recovery may not necessarily continue or even begin (Prochaska et al.; Purje, 2014). Former self-acknowledged addict Marc Lewis (a professor emeritus of developmental psychology and neuroscientist) argues that addiction is a desire, that it is learned and not a disease. According to Lewis, a behavior is often repeated when feelings of excitement, delight, or pleasure occur (Lewis, 2018). Further to this, neuroscience informs that the neural pathways associated with repeated thoughts and behaviors become stronger and more efficient. This is the same mechanism …

reflections on Berlin – Humanists UK

reflections on Berlin – Humanists UK

Published by Sam Flores

Author: Nick Baldwin, LGBT+ Humanists Coordinator On Saturday night, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Berlin for Christopher Street Day – one of Europe’s largest and oldest Pride celebrations – a man drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in the Tiergarten, close to the closing rally at the Brandenburg Gate. A woman was killed. 29 people were injured, several critically. The suspect, a 21-year-old man previously convicted in connection with plotting an attack and reported to have sought to join the so-called Islamic State, fled the scene and was shot dead by police the following day. German authorities are treating it as an Islamist terrorist attack. People had spent that day dancing. They had marched for hours through the centre of Berlin behind eighty floats, under a festival motto that translates as ‘blessing instead of hate’. It was, by every account, a day of joy: music and glitter and hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the simple, hard-won right to be visible. But someone looked at that celebration and saw a …

Do Cats Have Souls? Some Reflections

Do Cats Have Souls? Some Reflections

Published by Jenni Sidey

Reading Richard Stevens’ fine piece on feline compassion, prompted me to offer some thoughts on feline intelligence in general. He pointed to the way a mother cat calmed down a seemingly feral kitten simply by refusing to be triggered by anything the kitten did. Now that set me reminiscing. For example, when I moved to Ottawa some years ago, I adopted three orphans, Tom, Dick, and Harry, whose mothers were killed by the Storm Sandy blowby over Lake Huron. They were all toms; two were 12 weeks old and one was 6 weeks old. Perhaps surprisingly, the two bigger toms looked after the much younger kitten. Essentially they did what they remembered their mother doing (except for nipple feeding him). But that last part did not matter; by then he could feed himself. And he did. He stuffed himself. He quickly grew to be bigger than they were. He was soon Top Cat. Cold and unfeeling? Although cats are often considered in popular culture to be cold and unfeeling, a lot depends on how a …

Reflections on Mapping an A–Z Philosophy BlackList

Reflections on Mapping an A–Z Philosophy BlackList

Published by Jenni Sidey

Introduction First launched in 2025 as part of Black History Month programming, the project has grown into what is now titled the A–Z Philosophy BlackList, an expanding intellectual archive that currently features 158 names and counting. Led by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse alongside two Southwestern undergraduate students, Jayden Dawson and Raven Waugh, this list names Black intellectuals whose contributions have informed both philosophy and wider academic fields. While not exhaustive, the list is designed as an invitation to engage with a diverse range of thinkers whose ideas continue to shape knowledge production. Moreover, we acknowledge that any such project reflects the situated perspective of its producers and may inevitably leave some folks out. Importantly, Blackness in this project is framed as a political identity drawing from the South African Black Consciousness philosophy as espoused in Bantu Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, and N.C. Manganyi’s Being-Black-In-The-World. Each thinker respectively defined Blackness as a political identity, a radical humanism that aimed to reject the idea of blackness as non-white, qua non-human as classified by the Apartheid regime. …

Reflections on America’s 250th birthday : NPR

Reflections on America’s 250th birthday : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

The nation’s capital may be the focal point of the 250th Independence Day celebration, but people all across America have plans to mark the occasion, from boisterous public parades to quiet personal reflections on history. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP hide caption toggle caption Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP As the United States turns 250 years old, Americans across the country are spending the holiday thinking about what the big birthday means to them, with reflections and celebrations as diverse as the nation itself. NPR’s member station reporters fanned out to collect snapshots of the occasion from sea to shining sea. In one ‘City of Presidents,’ Main Street is decorated for a party At least two cities in the U.S.call themselves the “City of Presidents” and Cuba City, in Wisconsin, is one of them, largely due to its patriotic Main Street decorations. Every year from Memorial Day through Veteran’s Day, red, white, and blue shields, one for each U.S. president, are prominently displayed high up on the light poles lining Main Street. It’s a tradition that began in 1976 …

AI and Teaching: Inviting Reflections on Teaching in the Age of AI, Will Fraker

AI and Teaching: Inviting Reflections on Teaching in the Age of AI, Will Fraker

Published by Jenni Sidey

In my recent discussion sections for Philosophy of Science at UCLA, we’ve been working through Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn famously lays out the notion of a paradigm shift: a fundamental re-evaluation of the basic assumptions and methods that constitute normal scientific practice. In unpacking this concept with my students, I’ve felt an acute sense that the practice of teaching Philosophy is itself undergoing a kind of paradigm shift, one brought about by generative AI. Generative AI is now woven into the fabric of education. According to a 2026 study from the Higher Education Policy Institute, “AI use is now almost universal,” with 95% of students reporting use of AI in some capacity. The question is no longer whether AI will be used, but how we should teach in light of its ubiquity.  As scholars and educators in the humanities, we bring a specific set of skills to this discussion: the habits of conceptual clarity, rigorous reasoning, and critical examination. The aim of the AI and Teaching series is to harness these skills …

Reflections on the ‘Brave New World’ of Farming

Reflections on the ‘Brave New World’ of Farming

Published by Jenni Sidey

Farmers across the West are socioeconomically not in a good place right now. Many are leaving the profession, which used to be a vocation, due to big payoffs by the EU and other such wealthy bloated Net-Zero globalists encouraging them to sell the land. There is also the allure of AI and Hi-Tech machinery, which I’ll come to later. I used to work as an agricultural correspondent and editor of a farming magazine some 20 years ago and things were financially bad back then for farmers throughout the West but things are now a lot worse. The war on farming in the past was less obvious, but it goes back a long time to late-1950s/early ’60s, when new expensive machinery led to bigger intense farming and less farm employees, amongst other labour-led factors. With AI technologies, some farms are already hosting robotic ‘workers’ toiling away on the land, from dusk to dawn. These tend to the livestock’s needs, but there are also plans to have them watch over crops, while other agri-robots hoe weeds and …

In Her Final Reflections, Jane Goodall Issues a Warning: “Without Hope, We Fall Into Apathy”

In Her Final Reflections, Jane Goodall Issues a Warning: “Without Hope, We Fall Into Apathy”

Published by José Betancourt

For many of us, Jane Goodall was one of those cul­tur­al fig­ures who seemed always to have been around, and on some lev­el, made us feel like she always would be. But of course, no human being lives for­ev­er, no mat­ter how wide­ly admired. Goodall made her own depar­ture last fall, in the mid­dle of an Amer­i­can speak­ing tour, at the age of 91. Just two days there­after, she appeared as the guest on the pre­miere of Net­flix’s Famous Last Words, a pro­gram con­sist­ing of inter­views con­duct­ed express­ly to air only after the inter­vie­wee’s death. In the clip above, the show’s host, TV writer-direc­tor-pro­duc­er Brad Falchuk, asks her an out­ward­ly sim­ple ques­tion: “Who would you say you were?” Goodall describes her­self as “some­body sent to this world to try to give peo­ple hope in dark times, because with­out hope, we fall into apa­thy and do noth­ing, and in the dark times that we are liv­ing in now, if peo­ple don’t have hope, we’re doomed. How can we bring lit­tle chil­dren into this dark world we’ve …