philosophy

unmatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, in orange, blue, and green

Lydia Davis’s “Ethics” and the Instability of Logic

The short stories of Lydia Davis, in spite of their infamous brevity, often work on at least three levels. In the case of “Ethics,” a paragraph-long fiction that humorously interrogates the Golden Rule, the story works as a character study, a reductio ad absurdum argument, and a larger philosophical questioning.

ARRIVAL and the False Dichotomy of Free Will vs Determinism

ARRIVAL and the False Dichotomy of Free Will vs Determinism

ARRIVAL has been hailed for carving a space for the “literary science fiction movie,” and rightly so. Director Denis Villeneuve achieved the nearly impossible feat of making a compelling, relatively crowd-pleasing movie about linguistics, complete with a new alien language composed of 100 logograms, while also weaving in themes of international cooperation, humanism, and empathy.