Category: Philosophy
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What is Love?
Is there a subject more discussed but less understood than love? What exactly love is has as many definitions as there are people. Philosophers have tried for millennia to understand what love is. The Symposium of Plato famously presents multiple interpretations of love. Aristophanes tells the story of how love is the desire to join…
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What Makes a Good Person
The question of how to become a good person has as many answers as there are people in the world. There aren’t a lot of people who wouldn’t want to be a good person. But it is also the case (at least in my experience) that most people don’t regard themselves as a good person.…
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Why Study Philosophy?
It’s one of those questions someone who studies philosophy gets quite a lot. You’re sitting at a family dinner table and a distant relative asks you the question: “So, what do you do?” You answer: “Philosophy.” They stop to think for a small moment and then ask you what in the world you can do…
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Erich Fromm on Sadism
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…
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A Critique on Optimistic Nihilism
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…
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How to Start With Philosophy
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…
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On Paternalism
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…
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Nietzsche and Schopenhauer on Cruelty
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…
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The Difference Between Utopian and Scientific Socialism
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…
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Midas and the Wrong Conception of Wealth
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…
Elenchus Philosophy 