The Legacy of Plato and Aristotle

Philosophy deals with the biggest and most complex issues facing humanity and philosophical insights underpin all human endeavors. Because the questions considered by philosophy are so large and complicated, philosophy itself is a long conversation about those issues among many people across many years. To compare past perspectives with our […]

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Socrates’s Oracle

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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Calmly Resisting the Fad of Stoicism

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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Aristotle’s Theory of Change

(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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Why Do We Study Ancient Greek Philosophy?

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

Truth is Like a Lion

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

Epicurus on Happiness

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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Seneca - The mind must rest

Our Minds Must Relax

  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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