The Philosopher

From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026 By Tenzin Trepp The Ancients often insisted that only the present moment – the ‘now’ – truly exists, that the past is gone, while the future is not yet real. Some even thought that time itself was just an illusion. And yet… if the past is truly nothing and the future a fantasy, why do they weigh so heavily on us? We live through time so intimately, yet when we stop to analyse it, we risk losing our grip on what it means.

From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026 Young Palestinian woman harvesting grapes, in a picture taken around 1930 Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine Before the Flood is a unique collection of stories from Palestine, stories by turns disturbing, horrifying and yet also hopeful.

The Norns, painting by Alois Delug (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto) By Keith Tidman “Love of fate”—or amor fati, as Frederich Nietzsche referred to it in The Gay Science (1882) and later books such as Ecce Homo (Behold the Man, 1888)—means not just tolerating but full-on embracing all that happens in your life. The good and the bad alike, and everything in-between, with no exceptions.

From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026 Syria’s ancient city of Apamea, an important commercial centre in Hellenistic times Syria: a tangled web of Arabism, Imperialism and Colonialism S yria is a place where international politics, ideology, colonial legacy, religion, economics, and ordinary human survival all collide at once, which makes it both incredibly important and incredibly difficult to sum up succintly. Hence, this book demands quite a commitment from the reader.

From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026 Isaac Newton, after whome it was said the universe was governed by numbers Carissa Véliz takes a careful look at the Power of Numbers Prophecy starts with a rather bold claim: statements about the future are not factual. For philosophers, “not factual” in this case really means neither true nor false. “Undecided”. The evergreen counterexample that might come to mind might be: tomorrow, two plus two will still equal four. Is this true?

By Keith Tidman To begin, let’s visit the fact that we live in an emergent universe. Current cosmological evidence suggests that the universe started in a small, dense state, in which was compressed the origins of the entire observable universe that our species happens to inhabit. As convenient shorthand, that dense state is often referred to as a singularity. What then transpired, some 13.8 billion years ago, was a quintessential instance of emergence that formed for us the ultimate origin story.

From The Philosopher, Volume CXIII No. 2 Autumn 2025 Entropy, Speech and the Contents of Wittgenstein’s Pocket By Elizabeth Rohwer In my golden years, I changed tack—from a speech processing engineer, preoccupied with the computational extraction of meaning from speech, to an armchair philosopher, obsessed with explaining Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logic and language from a modern, 21st-century perspective.

From The Philosopher, Volume CXIII No. 1 Spring 2025 Common Sense and Communication: The Legacy of Wittgenstein’s Last Philosophical Puzzle By Elizabeth Rohwer Philosophy’s enfant terrible, Ludwig Wittgenstein, left us terse remarks scattered with philosophical thought-experiments, epigrams and inscrutable self-dialogues in his unpublished notes.

HUMOR AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL KEYSTONES By Keith Tidman Humor is one of those rarer things in the world that is universal, though what is funny is seen at least a little bit differently by everyone. Plato was particularly grumpy about the subject, proposing that the guardians of utopia, who rule the city, should never laugh. But for most of us, a sense of humor is always valued in a person, whether a spouse, a friend, a work colleague, an academic, or a public figure.

From The Philosopher CXII No. 2 Autumn 2024 Deconstructing the Zionist Myth Review article by Paula Stanyer. Shlomo Sand is clear eyed about the current situation in Israel. And in Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid? he seeks to challenge those who offer solutions based on two separate states, believing this to be both unrealistic and at odds with events in Israel since the 1967 war.