Philosophy Essays

A collection of philosophical essays I wrote about ethics, philosophical anthropology and epistemology, among others.

A comparison of Hegel’s and Leibniz’ theodicies

Hegel compares his approach to world history to a theodicy and more specifically to Leibniz’s Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (1710) (p. 45). What are the similarities and differences between Hegel’s approach to world history and this work by Leibniz? In his lectures on the philosophy of world history, Hegel explicitly refers to his approach of world history as a theodicy1....

A natural selection account of the evolution of knowledge

Insights from Nietzsche and Darwin In “The Gay Science”1, Friedrich Nietzsche delivers a narrative of the origin of knowledge. In this short essay, we show that Nietzsche’s account is evolutionary2 in the Darwinian sense. In the “Origin of species”3, Darwin proposed a true cause4 for the origin and evolution of species. The three main ingredients of this theory consist of a pressure of selection, a source of variation among individuals of the same species, and a mechanism for inheritance of traits....

Is Netflix dehumanizing ?

Recommendation systems from a philosophical and anthropological perspective: insights from Sartre and Heidegger. Introduction. Recommendation systems, as automated information systems aiming at providing recommendations to users with content they might appreciate, are now an integral part of our modern society. Social media, entertainment systems, news or advertising all actively use such automated systems to provide personalized content. Importantly, recommender systems have benefited from the rapid progress of machine learning to improve their performance and their personalization, allowing these systems to rely on data alone rather than on human-specified rules....