Assassination is the willful killing, by a sudden, secret, or planned attack, of a person—especially if prominent or important. It may be prompted by grievances, notoriety, financial, military, political or other motives. Assassinations are ordered by both individuals and organizations, and are carried out by their accomplices. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times. A person who carries out an assassination is called an assassin.
Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Euthanasia is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Those affirming the paradox generally conclude that if the conditions required for life to arise from non-living matter are as permissive as the available evidence on Earth indicates, then extraterrestrial life would be sufficiently common such that it would be implausible for it not to have been detected yet.
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher who is Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer's work specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which argues the moral imperative of donating to help the poor around the world. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian. He revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites".
Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future. Time travel is a concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. In fiction, time travel is typically achieved through the use of a device known as a time machine. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine.
The 20 July plot was a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the chancellor and leader of Nazi Germany, and overthrow the Nazi regime on 20 July 1944. The plotters were part of the German resistance, mainly composed of Wehrmacht officers. The leader of the conspiracy, Claus von Stauffenberg, tried to kill Hitler by detonating an explosive hidden in a briefcase. However, due to the location of the bomb at the time of detonation, the blast only dealt Hitler minor injuries. The planners' subsequent coup attempt also failed and resulted in a purge of the Wehrmacht.
Hans Michael Frank was a German politician, war criminal, and lawyer who served as head of the General Government in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with the current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility.
Reductio ad Hitlerum, also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. Arguments can be termed reductio ad Hitlerum if they are fallacious. Contrarily, straightforward arguments critiquing specifically fascist components of Nazism like Führerprinzip are not part of the association fallacy.
Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist and transhumanist. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is a former senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
A physical paradox is an apparent contradiction in physical descriptions of the universe. While many physical paradoxes have accepted resolutions, others defy resolution and may indicate flaws in theory. In physics as in all of science, contradictions and paradoxes are generally assumed to be artifacts of error and incompleteness because reality is assumed to be completely consistent, although this is itself a philosophical assumption. When, as in fields such as quantum physics and relativity theory, existing assumptions about reality have been shown to break down, this has usually been dealt with by changing our understanding of reality to a new one which remains self-consistent in the presence of the new evidence.
Time travel is a common theme in fiction, mainly since the late 19th century, and has been depicted in a variety of media, such as literature, television, film, and advertisements.
Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs; he took on emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate-granting program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the husband of curator and art historian Soyoung Lee.
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
The beginning of human personhood is the moment when a human is first recognized as a person. There are differences of opinion about the precise time when human personhood begins and the nature of that status. The issue arises in a number of fields, including science, religion, philosophy, and law, and is most acute in debates about abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, German Führer Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Wade Winston Wilson, also known as Deadpool, is a character portrayed by Ryan Reynolds in 20th Century Fox's X-Men film series and later the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) media franchise produced by Marvel Studios. Based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza, he was loosely adapted for his first appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), in which he is depicted as a member of Major William Stryker's Team X who is transformed into a genetically altered mutant killer known as Weapon XI, before being defeated by his former teammate Wolverine. This iteration of the character was negatively received by both critics and fans alike for deviating from the source material.
