Light appears most frequently as a metaphor for truth, knowledge, and light. Western philosophy since Plato's cave has employed light as a representation of knowledge and darkness for ignorance or confusion. But shadows, those dark and shadowy things that appear only...
Happiness has been the most fundamental human desire across the globe. All philosophy, religion, and culture have grappled with how to live well and how to become happy in some way. Yet, a paradox is formed when one asks: does the search for happiness actually hinder...
Tragedy has always been strangely attractive. From Greek and Shakespearean tragedy to opera and film, people hunger for tales of pain, loss, and misery. But why do we value ugliness? Why is labor born of suffering so much more real than labor born of happiness?...
We are creatures of time, yet in a much deeper way, we are creatures of narrative. We're bound by memory in the past, by sensation in the moment, but it's in the future that our imagination truly comes alive. That's where we put our desires, hopes, and fears. But...
Here's a question that actually makes you wonder: are you who you are bound up in your memories? To ask seems to be at the very root of what it means to be human. I mean, memories aren't really histories of what occurred, are they? They're the bricks of everything,...
The concept of nothingness has confounded philosophers, scientists, and mystics from the start of time. Nothingness seems like a simple concept at first, it is that which doesn't exist, the void, the non-being. But if you examine it closely, the concept collapses in...
Truth is perhaps the oldest and most abiding issue of philosophy. From the pre-Socratic skepticism of earliest times to the analytic acumen of contemporary philosophy, the question of what truth is, and whether it is anything at all apart from a human construction,...
Dreams have always vexed man because they remove the line between reality and fantasy, between will and necessity. In life, morality is entwined with responsibility: we are held responsible on the basis of decisions that we knowingly take, of intentions before our...
Boredom is a condition that almost all human beings experience, but one which is most regularly considered useless or infuriating. A distracted gazing at the clock, an occasional yawning in a mundane classroom, or aimless surfing of a phone news stream, these are...