Sadism is one of those aspects of humans which is quite hard to fathom in my opinion. The fact we can actually love hurting other people and enjoy it. I have made a post about cruelty in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but there are many other intellectuals who have taken the topic of sadism and […]
There is this video on YouTube by the channel Kurzgesagt on optimistic nihilism[1], where the narrator explains the philosophy behind the optimistic nihilist. In short, the video explains how nothing has any intrinsic value, because in then ‘end’ nothing which we have built will exist. The French postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard asked this same question […]
I’ve been studying philosophy for two years now and it might be daunting to start reading on the many topics or the many different writers. I am at the moment reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and it’s a book I have a hard time going through. Between five and ten pages a day is about […]
As we’re entering the second half of this year, I wanted to take the time and reflect on the best books I’ve read so far. The range of genres is pretty great, but it mostly consists of philosophy and history as those are the subjects I am most interested in. Let’s start off with the […]
We have all experienced a moment when someone who was a bit older, or knew a bit more than you, told you to not do something or really do something, without giving any real explanations other than they know what is good for you. That is a form of paternalism. It’s when someone makes decisions […]
Humans have the ability to do truly horrendous things. When animals hurt each other, we can think of reasons why they do it. To protect their nest, or to hunt. But never do we think that they do it on purpose just to see the other being suffer. That it seems to be something only […]
Karl Marx is one of the most famous, if not the most famous, social intellectuals to have existed. A whole movement bears his name, and his critique of capitalism is still used to this day. But Marx was also a severe critic of the socialists of his time. In particular those who he and Engels […]
Simone de Beauvoir is mostly remembered as one of the greatest feminist intellectuals this world has ever seen. But she was also one of the leading French Existentialists with Sartre and Camus. Where Sartre tried to create an ontology for existentialism and gave the groundworks for an ethical theory, de Beauvoir took it upon herself […]
Hate speech is a term that gets thrown around frequently nowadays. People on the left are suggesting we impose laws that would limit hate speech, while those on the right are advocating that we shouldn’t censor speech how hateful it might be. Obviously, this is a characterization as not all people on the left are […]
The ancient story of Midas is a well-known story from Greek mythology. After Midas, King of Phrygia, found an old man Silenus in his garden and invited him in for some food and drink, Silenus granted Midas a meeting with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, parties and more. Because of his hospitality (xenia in […]
