Unlike scientific fields that build on previous discoveries, philosophy progresses cyclically. Each new generation must start fresh, grappling with the same fundamental questions of life and knowledge. This is why ancient ideas like Epicureanism reappear in modern forms like utilitarianism, as they address timeless human intuitions.
According to emotivism, when someone says 'murder is wrong,' they are not stating a verifiable fact about the world. Instead, they are expressing an emotion of disapproval. The moral component ('is wrong') functions like adding an angry emoji or a disapproving tone to the word 'murder,' conveying feeling rather than fact.
Discussing philosophical topics like suicide publicly is not merely an intellectual exercise. For some listeners, it can be a deeply significant and influential discourse. This places a serious ethical responsibility on the speaker to handle such subjects with care, recognizing that their words have real-world consequences beyond the 'intellectual playground.'
Unlike ancient Greek philosophy where ethics, metaphysics, and logic were deeply interconnected, modern philosophy is largely separated into distinct, specialized fields. For example, the Stoics believed their ethics were a direct consequence of their understanding of the world's nature (metaphysics), a link often lost in modern discourse.
Major philosophical texts are not created in a vacuum; they are often direct products of the author's personal life and historical context. For example, Thomas Hobbes wrote 'Leviathan,' which argues for an authoritarian ruler, only after fleeing the chaos of the English Civil War as a Royalist. This personal context is crucial for understanding the work.
Engaging with deeply pessimistic philosophers like Emil Cioran can have a surprisingly uplifting effect. By framing life as inherently characterized by meaningless suffering, the philosophy lowers the stakes of personal failures. When things go comically wrong, it becomes an affirmation of the worldview, leading to laughter instead of despair.
The core argument of panpsychism is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, not an emergent one that requires complexity. In this view, complex systems like the brain don't generate consciousness from scratch; they simply organize fundamental consciousness in a way that allows for sophisticated behaviors like memory and self-awareness.
Under the theory of emotivism, many heated moral debates are not about conflicting fundamental values but rather disagreements over facts. For instance, in a gun control debate, both sides may share the value of 'boo innocent people dying' but disagree on the factual question of which policies will best achieve that outcome.
Philosopher David Benatar's antinatalism rests on an 'asymmetry argument.' He claims that for a non-existent being, the absence of potential pain is a positive good. However, the absence of potential pleasure is not considered bad. This asymmetry makes bringing a new life into existence an inherently immoral act, as it introduces guaranteed suffering for no net gain.
A key measure of philosophy's historical success isn't solving its own problems, but rather birthing new academic fields. Disciplines like mathematics, physics, economics, and psychology all originated as branches of philosophical inquiry before developing into their own distinct areas of study, a point Bertrand Russell made.
Modern science almost exclusively investigates the 'efficient cause' (the agent that brought something about). It largely ignores the other three causes defined by Aristotle: the material cause (what it's made of), the formal cause (its form or shape), and the final cause (its purpose or 'telos'), thus providing an incomplete picture.
While famous for 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' this was an early work that Camus himself found insufficient. He wrestled with its moral implications, particularly that it values quantity of life over quality. His later works, like the novel 'The Plague,' explore concepts like friendship and shared struggle as potential sources of meaning, moving beyond his initial stark absurdism.
The widespread and instinctual revulsion toward incest provides a strong case for emotivism. When pressed for a logical reason why it's wrong (beyond pragmatic concerns like birth defects), most people fall back on emotional expressions like 'it's just gross.' This suggests the moral judgment is rooted in a fundamental emotion, not a rational principle.
Experiments on patients with a severed corpus callosum show that one brain hemisphere can be instructed to perform an action (e.g., 'walk over there') without the other's knowledge. When asked why they did it, the other hemisphere invents a plausible but false reason ('I wanted some air'). This suggests our rational self is often a post-hoc confabulator.