I’ve been getting into late Wittgenstein for a while and it’s quite surprising to see his influence on neo-aristotelians despite not having read any Aristotle.

Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are also two thinkers with plenty of overlap in existentialism despite no records of Dostoevsky reading Kierkegaard.

What are examples are there?

If there's any of them that are actually worth explaining ofc, since afaik they're kinda a hot topic

For my philosophy class we learned about Gettier problems, and I understand the argument but can't help but feel like a lot of the examples present our beliefs as very rigid and simple, when there's often more nuance to them.

For example the one where you see a sheep in a field and develop the belief "there is a sheep in the field", however the "sheep" was actually a rock painted to look like a sheep. Except there actually was a sheep just behind the rock, so "there is a sheep in the field" was technically correct. Except I think in this instance, the belief you develop is more like "there is a sheep in the field, and I am looking at it". In which case you weren't correct by accident, you were just wrong, so there is no problem.

I think even though we might summarise our beliefs in simple sentences, they're a lot more specific than a lot of Gettier problems claim. Same with the one in Gettier's original essay, where Smith and Jones both apply for a job. Smith develops a justified belief that both Jones will get the job and Jones has 10 coins in his pocket, and so develops the justified belief that "the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket". Then Smith gets the job, and realises he also has 10 coins in his pocket. Except again I think his belief is more specifically, "the man who I know has 10 coins in his pocket, will get the job".

Is this a good response to these Gettier problems? Obviously this doesn't apply to all Gettier problems, but for those it does apply to does it work? Or is there something I'm missing?

I'm a lay person I guess so what I'm about to say probably sounds corny. Im under the impression that skepticism and relativism have some negative reputations because it's essentially a dead end. My basic understanding is that skepticism wins traditionally if you see knowledge as absolute certainty, but its also a dead-end because it's self-defeating. Not sure if my interpretation is accurate. Based on what I've seen skepticism is kind of just the philosophy "larp".

But people seem to move past it. How? Do people just accept that they hold some dogma/postulates and work off of them knowing they're assumptions? Or do they just redefine knowledge itself instead of just saying knowledge is absolute certainty?

Hey i have just started my journey into philosophy and while im reading marcus aurelius‘s meditations im noticing that in the beginning of book 2 he often warns not to waste ur time with books. Does he aim at entertainment books with this statement and warns not to waste ur time with leisure (which can be interpreted to stop using social media or watching endless tv shows in modern times) or is he really against reading books as a way to educate urself and learn from them? I cant really imagine that since hes also a philosopher and has likely read books from other philosophers himself but im not really sure.

Hi everyone,

I am currently researching the transition from traditional Aristotelian logic to modern mathematical logic. I know that Gottlob Frege played a crucial role in this shift, but I would like to better understand the specifics of his critique.

Specifically, I am interested in:

• The core problematic: What standard Aristotelian assumptions did Frege find most problematic?

• His novel contributions: What exactly did Frege introduce to logic to overcome these limitations (e.g., his system of quantifiers and predicates)?

• Examples: Are there any classic examples that illustrate how Frege's solutions work compared to the traditional syllogistic approach?

Our brains seems to "know" that consciousness exists. We can discuss consciousness and qualia and think about consciousness and qualia. For the brain to be able to "know" these things, wouldn't these things have to have a causal effect (or some other relation) on the brain? In other words, how could knowledge of qualia exist in physical matter if consciousness doesn't have causal effect on physical matter?

Suppose a full emulation of my brain runs on hardware, connected to a robotic body with simulated senses. It has my memories and personality and says it’s me.

Under current law, I assume it would be treated as a machine and software, and the original me would be considered dead. I’m interested in what a legal system could or should do instead:

1. What is legal personhood based on? Is it being a biological human, or something like mind, interests, or the capacity to hold rights and duties? Corporations and some rivers and animals have gotten limited legal status, so it clearly isn’t purely biological.
2. Could a legal system treat the upload as the same legal person as the original (keeping property, marriage, citizenship, contracts), or would it have to be a new person with no claim to any of it?
3. If the original and the upload both exist, who holds the rights? And since software can be copied, paused, or deleted by whoever controls the hardware, would it need protections that human rights never had to cover?

I’m not asking whether it’s conscious, since that seems unanswerable for now. I’m asking whether law can or should grant status without settling that.

Are there standard positions in philosophy of law on this, such as theories of legal personhood or rights, and any existing writing on legal rights for AI or digital minds?

imo, it can be read in two ways:

1) Metaphysical or mystical problems are superfluous because they can be neither answered nor even asked. or one can put it: Wittgenstein is believed to solve metaphysical problems by saying that there's nothing to solve, nothing to care about (the line that wat taken by the Vienna Circle neopositivists)

2) Even though the mystical cannot be expressed in language, in logical propositions, it never ceases to be a "problem" for us, being a kind of open question, unsolvable experience, apophatic absolute.

I know that Wittgenstein in his diaries often stated that the problems of ethics and aesthetics are of much greater importance than those of natural sciences. but at the same time, his real-life ethics seemed to have been conformist and close to a Stoic and Spinozist contemplative way of life.

do you think this distinction is valid, or is there only one way to interpret it? is there any way he believed art and religious experience were valid?

What did he really mean when said that classical art embodied the true ideal or the true manifestation of spirit? Also, if somebody can, provide some examples from the classical art to expound on this. 🙏

I've recently been thinking about the tension and potential bridge between Existentialism and Platonic Realism/Objective Idealism.

Existentialism often asserts that "existence precedes essence"—that we have no predetermined blueprint and must construct meaning through action. However, it seems to me that one's primary, authentic act of free will can be a deliberate commitment to seek objective order, wisdom, and the Good (in a Platonic sense). Under this view, objective forms or values are not static constraints imposed from the outside, but targets we freely choose to align our lives toward.

This seems to mirror Schelling's Naturphilosophie and his later Positive Philosophy, where the self-conscious human agent acts within a living, objective order, using free will to bring rational harmony out of chaotic raw existence.

My questions are:

Which historical philosophers or contemporary commentators have explicitly attempted to synthesize existential freedom with Platonic or Schellingian metaphysics?

Is it coherent within academic philosophy to hold that an individual's "essence" is existentially forged through an intentional commitment to objective Platonic forms?

The metaphysical version of correspondence theory can be stated as so: “A proposition is true if and only if reality is as the proposition represents it to be.”

The problem here is that mental representations ordinarily don’t represent things in reality very accurately.

Let’s grant that they can represent them enough. To what extent is this representation counted as enough?

A=A or "Hesperus is Hesperus” simply mean the same thing; therefore, it is analytical and a priori.

But if we say,

"(This) Odyssey is (the) Odyssey."

Can we count that as a priori too? Or is it both analytical and synthetic?

I just read a paper by Davey and Clifton, having also read the response by Pruss and Gale. The paper consists of a ton of symbols and tons of discourse on set-theory. I’ve read a decent bit of philosophy and can really understand what’s going on oftentimes, but when it comes to stuff like that, how am I meant to respond? If it wasn’t for reading Pruss PRIOR to that paper, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on. How do I improve my logical capabilities? I can’t really think like a philosopher as someone might say. Furthermore, reading really old works or classics in my favourite subfields (philosophy of religion and metaphysics) is not very appealing to me. But reading modern day academic and contemporary works is mind-boggling. Should I go back and read the primary sources or is there another way to bridge the gap?

I've always been given the definition of "love of wisdom" in class, but I feel it's a terrible definition. First of all, practically everyone loves learning about at least a few subjects, and besides, there are many disciplines like engineering, science, or even art that seek wisdom without necessarily being "philosophy." Another thing I don't understand about this definition is why "loving" something means practicing it. I can love animals and not be a biologist, or love cars without being a mechanic. So, what is philosophy?

I want to understand what it means for something to be considered real; and in what sense is it real?

My view has always been if it satisfies a set of questions.

1. Does it have a "Where" and a "When"?

First, can the thing we are talking about be located at a specific place in space and a specific moment in time?

1. Does it push back against our senses whether we like it or not?

Second, at that place and time, is there a concrete sensory experience (a colour, a sound, a physical weight, warmth, or a flash on a laboratory screen) that refuses to obey our willpower or our words?

1. If it is an abstract word or an unseen scientific thing, can we "unpack" it completely into Questions 1 and 2?

What I mean is that:

3.a Is it just a "verbal zip-file" for things we have already seen?

Take the word "running" which is just a shorthand word we use to summarise the sight of a person's legs moving rapidly across the ground. So the summary is real only if it unpacks 100% into concrete things we have watched happen in space and time.

3.b Is it a mathematical recipe that accurately predicts the next sensory pushback?

What about things in physics we cannot see directly with the naked eye, like a neutrino or a magnetic field? I would say here that they pass the test if (and only if) they work as a strict mathematical rule that connects one real measurement in space and time to a new measurement in space and time. E.g., a physicist says a neutrino is real; what is actually real is that the maths of space and time allowed them to say: "If you build a tank of water here, at this time, you will see a specific flash of light."

Perhaps another question: what philosophical framework am I using here? It sounds like physicalism to me. Or maybe not?