Paulo Seabra

Abortion is a complicated issue, and though politicized to be either completely forbidden or completely permissible, I think that the philosophy behind it is a bit more complex than either side would like to admit. In deontological terms we'd be remiss to consider abortion a moral act, or at least a morally neutral one, because at its core we're talking about an invasive procedure that, by definition, seeks to end the existence of a living being. I phrase it in that way to try to avoid moral terms at this point in the discussion, but I do think that doing so ends up creating a silly euphemism. I suppose we'll get to that in due time but I don't quite see how abortion can be all that vague and neutral. If left alone, the woman will eventually give birth and a new human being will come into the world, with all his or her inalienable human rights promptly recognized. So if we are given no context whatsoever, we would never allow for an abortion, and if we conceive of a per...

I don't know what to think about Ravi Zacharias. Back when I was a militant atheist I didn't really know him, and yet I vaguely recall a white-haired man with a soft voice, and I may have read one or two comments from christians telling us atheists to look up Ravi's videos, proudly boasting we would have no answer to his arguments. As for me, I probably would have had something of an answer to them, but I would have been equally proud and equally boastful, I would have argued with what I now consider to be an unfounded faith in the meaning of life and in the philosophical underpinnings of morality... What I'm trying to say is that, in recent years, I began to rethink my atheism, and when I somewhat recently found Ravi's speeches, I was rather moved, both rationally and otherwise, and I wondered if this kind indian man with a past sorrow not entirely unlike mine, this man whose love for John 14:19 resurrected him, I wondered if he might have been the one to understan...

Recently I was asked about the greatest TV show of all time and, as it is often the case, I tend to overthink things when having to recommending it to a real person. I start to wonder if they will like it, if they are going into it with a wrong idea of what it is, if the show, or book or movie for that matter, contains scenes they will find distasteful, and so on. I reckon it's just one of those many idiosyncrasies related to having studied philosophy, even if only a little bit. It just comes with the job, you end up overthinking every word, always wondering if you are misleading this person, even if you are absolutely convinced the TV show they asked your opinion about is one of the absolute greatest masterpieces in all of human history... So while I'm a staunch defender of The Sopranos, even going so far as to evangelize it, I still hesitate about doing just that when presented with an actual chance, and whenever I'm asked to give my opinion I always wonder, I always thr...

In recent years I have more or less quit gaming, except for when a strange mood hits me for a little while and the only way to exorcise it is to actually play the game that has been resurfaced by that wave of nostalgia of uncertain origin. I have done so with Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Fallout: New Vegas and Pokémon Emerald,  all of which I have previously written down some thoughts because I figured I might as well, and I reckon because I hoped someone just might like what I had to say. This time I was slowly overwhelmed by a game that came out alongside the now very distant advent of the PlayStation 2, a game with so much character in every detail and beauty in its entire story and music that its few but dedicated fans have never forgotten it and still cherish it to this very day. That game is, of course, Dark Cloud. Back in the day, buying games wasn't as easy as it is now. You couldn't just buy a game and, if you didn't like...

Once upon a time, fans emerged from movie theaters everywhere, fresh after watching the exciting new entry in the Star Wars franchise, and because it was such a cultural phenomenon, there was a ton of media coverage of the entire event, both before and after the screening. Before viewing, fans everywhere were going crazy after all those months of secrecy and anticipation, what with all those questions about the new characters and their respective secrets within the story. After viewing, fans were very satisfied and they left the theater after what they considered an amazing cinematic experience they planned to repeat many a-time over. However, when the excitement wore off, public perception began to change, and people eventually grew to more or less dislike the movie and its subsequent titles. That movie was The Force Awakens. Well, sorta. The joke was that the movie was meant to be The Phantom Menace, and it might not be entirely correct to say Force Awakens is as disliked as the ...

I very casually liked the first two Fast & Furious movies when I was a kid, mostly because they were constantly on TV during those lazy saturday afternoons. Over time though I became a bit more serious about my interests in cinema, and as such I began to ignore certain movies I knew wouldn't be all that good so as to make more time for movies I know would be proper intellectual cinema, whatever that means. And so it was for quite a few years, I suppose, until one night when I was in college, me and my friends went to McDonald's for a healthy meal and we engaged in some degenerate conversation. At a certain point they began to talk about Furious 7, which I had never seen before. They just went on and on, constantly describing crazy action scenes one after the other to the point where it was hard to believe so much madness could be contained in a single movie. Then over the next couple of days, out of a mix of curiosity and of not wanting to be left out of further discussio...