"Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher."
—Michael Foucault (1926-1984)

"The most thought-provoking thing about this thought-provoking time is that we’re still not thinking."
—Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

"Thinking is a lonely business."
—Heidegger to Hannah Arendt in Hannah Arendt (2012)

This New York Times opinion piece, When Philosophy Lost its Way, is a fantastic take on the often-dismal state of contemporary philosophy.

"There was a brief window when philosophy could have replaced religion as the glue of society; but the moment passed. People stopped listening as philosophers focused on debates among themselves."

"Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it's no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy's all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very 'scientific.'"

I streamed my first ever Facebook Live event last night--a Fireside Chat on Earth Day 2020 focused on the topic: "Which is preferable as an activity (which would you give up if you had to): Fire or Television (including streaming)?"
Watch it here

"Homo erectus appeared, roughly 1.8 million years ago. Until recently, the earliest human hearths were dated to about 250,000 B.C.; last year [2012], however, the discovery of charred bone and primitive stone tools in a cave in South Africa tentatively pushed the time back to roughly one million years ago." (source)