Category: Discussions
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Sarcastaball and the Fear of Pain
Would you watch or play a sport with no tension? No risk of injury? No way to attain excellence? Well, the South Park episode of Sarcastaball explores this idea. There, the children of South Park have to play a sport that cannot potentially harm them. No injury in Sarcastaball, no pain. Byung-Chul Han would see…
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Bullshit Jobs & Alienation
Why don’t we like our jobs? Let me begin with a provocative claim: most people don’t really enjoy their jobs. Another claim, equally unsettling, is that many jobs are not only disliked but also pointless. At the same time, we live in a culture terrified of job loss—politicians like Barack Obama frequently warned of the…
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What Makes an Expert
The trust in experts has diminished. But what makes an expert? Here, I will outline that an expert has a certain authority and why this authority is being doubted.
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Trump in Washington and the Banality of Evil
Terms like fascism and totalitarianism frequently surface in discussions about Donald Trump. At first glance, this seems understandable: many traits associated with these concepts resonate with Trump’s political style and rhetoric. Yet in doing so, we may overlook a crucial opportunity to gain deeper insight into the Trump phenomenon—and the broader societal dynamics that enabled…
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Life as an Artwork
Friedrich Nietzsche declared in The Birth of Tragedy that art is “the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of life.” According to Nietzsche, art goes beyond the creation of individual works. It must be applied to life itself. Life should be viewed as an artwork, as “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and…
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The Problem with Hate Speech
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…
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How to Read 50 Books in 4 months
Recently I finished my 50th book of 2021. The book was a biography of Karl Marx named Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones. If I continue like this, I will have read 150 books by the end of 2021, which means I’ll have read 49 books more than last year. Every year…
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The Japanese Holocaust; or Modern Negationism
We all know about the horrific events which happened during the second World War. We all know the name Hitler and what it meant. Nazi is still a widely used insult towards racist individuals (or those we deem racist). It is hard to imagine how anyone could say that the holocaust, where Nazi-Germany rounded up…
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Why You Shouldn’t Care About Grades
The title might surprise you. What? I shouldn’t care about grades? But those things influence how my life will be! If I have bad grades then I won’t be accepted into the school I want, or I won’t get the job I want. I believe that is thinking about education in a wrong way. Obviously,…
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Hitler’s Philosophy: The Ideology of Fascism
The person of Hitler is a very interesting one. How could one man be responsible for one of the greatest conflicts this world has ever seen? One answer: he had an idea. Hitler (at least he claimed) read many books of influential German philosophers like Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel and even Marx. He used the writings…
Elenchus Philosophy 