Minding the Gap

By Dylan Skurka, January 2022 This piece was originally published in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Philosophy Now Magazine and can be found here. Do we have free will, or are our lives just an amalgamation of forces beyond our control, pushing us around like billiard balls? The question seems straightforward enough, but if…

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On Being Jewish: An Eerie Middle Ground

By Dylan Skurka, August 2021 Nothing bewilders me like my Jewishness. It’s one of those things that is always just there hanging around on the periphery, too elusive to grab a hold of but too omnipresent to ever be ignored either. My Jewishness is something that is central to my past — conservative Jewish household,…

Fighting Extremism with Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy

By Dylan Skurka, May 2021. It probably goes without saying by now that one of the defining features of the world today is its polarization: we’ve got liberals and conservatives endlessly throwing virtual jabs at each other on social media, atheists blaming religious faith for the problems of the world, religious fundamentalists blaming atheism for the same…

In Appreciation of the Purposelessness of Philosophy

By Dylan Skurka, February 2021. “Oh… What do you hope to do with that?” As any philosophy student knows, there is no question more soul-crushing than that one. Maybe it was a concerned friend wondering how you were going to make any money when you were out of school or someone you met at a party…

The Zhuangzi: A Therapeutic Text for the Ages

By Dylan Skurka, December 2020. "When a drunken man falls from a cart, he may be hurt but he will not be killed. His bones and joints are no different from those of other men, but the degree of harm done by the fall differs radically, for the spiritual in him forms one intact whole.…

York University 11th Annual Philosophy Graduate Conference: Philosophy of Emotion

Please join us April 25-26 2019 in Vanier College 001 (Renaissance room) for our Annual Graduate Conference. The talk schedule and abstracts for keynotes can be found below. Thursday, April 25th  10:00-10:30 Coffee, Registration, Brief Opening Remarks 10:30-11:30 Rachel Lehmann (Georgia State) : Feeling Insulted is Being Insulted Comments by Jef Delvaux 11:30-12:30 Sanja Sreckovic (Belgrade): The role of emotions in…

Hope and Video Games

By Brandon Tinklenberg, February 2019.   During the second grade, I was obsessed with the video game called Oregon Trail. The game was first developed in 1971 by three Minnesota high school history teachers, who famously created the game in just two weeks. It was later redesigned by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) and…

CFA: 11th Annual York Philosophy Graduate Conference

Our 11th annual conference, which will be held on April 25-26 2019, will focus on the nature and significance of emotions. We will accept submissions on epistemology, ethics, metaethics, aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy. Papers that address any of the following questions are especially encouraged: What are…

Holding Publishers Responsible for Fake News

by Daniel Saunders, November 2018. In the Black Mirror episode, ‘Nosedive’, Lacie lives in a world in which even her smallest social interactions are rated and figured into a score. Lacie engages in rigorous self-discipline to keep her score high but after a series of unfortunate events, she loses control, her score plummets and she…

Are Captive Primates Robbed of their Culture?

By Brandon Tinklenberg, August 2018. Abigail died at 41 years of age in April of 2001. She was suffering from kidney failure. She was a Sumatran Orangutan who spent most of her life in zoo enclosures in Toronto. She was first acquired by the Riverdale Zoo in the early 1960s. Toronto’s first zoo, Riverdale was…