Knowledge is like a garden Knowledge garden Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot by harvested. – African proverb
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Tag: Philosophy
Don’t Be Afraid to Let Your Kids Try It
Kids on philosophy Philosophy
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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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I Give You the Übermensch
One of the most notoriously misunderstood concepts in the history of philosophy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. The word “Übermensch” is too often mistranslated into English as “superman” but the German “Über” means “over” not “super.” We need to be clear on that distinction to understanding what Nietzsche really meant. Nietzsche’s […]
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Kant’s Sixth Proof of God
Kant’s Sixth Proof of God Immanuel Kant definitively demonstrated in his writings that no proof or disproof of the existence of god could be fashioned from pure reason. He conclusively and persuasively showed that all of the five standard rational proofs of god are inadequate to prove the case. By […]
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Kant’s Categories
A colleague recently suggested to me that Immanuel Kant’s categories of understanding could be described as algorithms that organize sense data. An algorithm, the someone said, is defined as “a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation” (2003 […]
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Beethoven and Philosophy
Beethoven and Philosophy Many people are not aware of the fact that Beethoven’s tremendous musical innovation was in part influenced by the incredible innovation occurring in German philosophy at that time. Beethoven knew several members of the German Idealist movement and corresponded with them. German Idealism was an early 19th […]
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Intelligence
Intelligence is not thinking you know everything without questioning, but questioning everything you think you know. This is not the same as skepticism. It is not questioning that knowledge is possible, it is question whether I have knowledge. As Descartes wrote in his Meditations, what we need to keep in […]
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Double Positive
During a lecture, the Oxford linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. To which Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser responded in a dismissive tone,
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