British - Author | 1968 -
I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.
Julian Baggini
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Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.
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If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.
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Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.
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Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.
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Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
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Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.
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This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don't accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols, but we also want egalitarianism, and that requires proclamations of humility from our gods.
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The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.
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Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources.
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Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.
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People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.
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