philopapers

Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality. One shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif, […]

Shawn Harte on a fleeting dream. “Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution,” warns the Buddha, insightfully foreshadowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the ineluctable tendency of a system towards disorder) in a way whose simplicity would impress even a modern physicist. This law of anitya, or ‘impermanence’, proclaims that all contingent existence

Eva Cybulska peers into Friedrich Nietzsche’s stormy psyche. Where one can no longer love, one should – pass by!Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), ‘Of Passing By’ Whatever I create and how much I love it – soon I have to oppose itThus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of Self-Overcoming’ Few would associate Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) with love. And yet

The word Thnetosophy derives from Greek roots meaning ’the knowledge of the world of the thnetos (the mortal human being)’. Greek roots: θνητός (mortal human being) σοφία (knowledge). The term thnetosophy separates mortal humans from future humans, who reach immortality in far futurity. Thnetosophy considers us, mortal humans, as progenitors of future humans. Otherwise the

Stuart Greenstreet finds that free will and determinism really do go together. Samuel Johnson got to the core of philosophy’s hardest problem in one line: “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Theory denies the will is free because science doesn’t exempt human beings from the causal laws which

Joshua Mozersky argues that reality itself might be accessible to us. Immanuel Kant is the grandfather of social constructivism – the theory that people construct reality out of a shared human experience. According to Kant, the world we experience of space, time, matter, and causation, is structured by the human mind. His point is not

Matt McManus explains why people have absolute worth. “What is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price ; that which, even without presupposing such a need, conforms with a certain taste has a fancy price ; but that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in

Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment’s leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace. The newspaper Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant in 1784, “It is a favourite idea of Herr Professor Kant that the ultimate goal of the human race is the establishment of a perfect constitution.”

Peter Rickman on the unsettling similarities between jokes and philosophy. Tell the average person – perhaps the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus – that according to Plato, that bus is not real, is merely an appearance or an imitation or an intangible reality, the form or idea of a bus, the bus which “God

How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?It depends on how you define ‘change’. How many existentialists does it take to change a light bulb?Two – one to bemoan the darkness until the other redefines something else as light. How many analytic philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?None –