Adding philosophical depth to anything and everything
One of the few philosophers who is a household name, Socrates is famous for being a gadfly who was condemned to death. A citizen jury of Athens decided that Socrates deserved to die. Why? We must rely on Plato’s account in Apology to try to understand what happened and why. […]
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Do you remember Pet Rocks? You need to be older to remember them, but here’s a good history of them. The Pet Rock was the ultimate triumph of marketing over substance. The Pet Rock was a rock, just a plain rock, in a plain cardboard box labeled “Pet Rock.” I […]
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There is a TV show. Inside it are many tall tales. It demands we give up all the critical thinking we have ever been taught. Its absurdity is everywhere. Its nonsense is right before our eyes. They are not honest, they have never been honest. Why am I being so […]
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(Video and text below.) How Objects Change One of the biggest problems that ancient Greek philosophers dealt with was the problem of change. Why and how do objects change? Plato had agreed with a number of Greek philosophers before him that change was an uncomfortable dilemma. Their reasoning was that […]
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Embedded video, “Why Do We Study Greek Philosophy?”; click to view. Text Transcript of “Why Study Ancient Greek Philosophy”: It may seem odd to study thinkers who wrote over 2,000 years ago. We don’t study scientists from ancient times, don’t treat what they thought as anything more than a historical […]
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Truth is Like a Lion “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” – Augustine Augustine (354-430) gets a bad rap, and for good reason given his obsessively prudish attitudes about sex and religious freedom. He did, however, essentially […]
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Epicurus on Happiness “We must, therefore, pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it.” – Epicurus Epicurus is one of the major philosophers in the Hellenistic period, the three centuries following […]
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Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting […]
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