In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just by the earthquake...
If Abraham had gone ahead and killed his son he would have done something morally wrong. A father has a basic duty to look after his son, and certainly shouldn't tie him to an altar and cut his throat...
In a civilized society freedom to offend should be protected, but
Central to Mill’s approach throughout On Liberty is his ‘Harm Principle’, the idea that individual adults should be free to do whatever they wish up to the point where they harm another person in the...
إنّ القارئ المثالي: هو القارئُ الناقد، الذي يعتمد المناقشة المستمرة للبراهين المستعملة، والتفكير في براهين مناقضة لها
Wisdom and understanding in the course of human history will only come fully at a late stage, when we're looking back on what has already happened, like someone looking back on the events of a day as...
The problem as he saw it was not how short our lives are, but rather how badly most of us use what time we have.
Machiavelli stresses that it's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved. Ideally you would be both loved and feared, but that's hard to achieve. If you rely on your people loving you, then you...
Everything we perceive takes place in time and space, and every change has a cause. But according to Kant, that is not because of the way reality ultimately is: it is a contribution of our minds. We d...
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.
The mind shaping reality just is reality. There is nothing beyond it. But this did not mean that reality remained in a fixed state. For Hegel, everything is in a process of change, and that change tak...
Minority opinions should not be silenced just because they are held by very few people. Unfashionable ideas have potential value for the whole of humanity, even if only held by one person: If all mank...
Those who do the right thing don't do it simply because of how they feel: the decision has to be based on reason, reason that tells you what your duty is, regardless of how you happen to feel.
Sartre explained what he meant by the anguish of choice through the true story of a student who had come to ask his advice during the war. This young man had to make a very difficult decision. He coul...
Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth.
Instead of looking to increase our pleasure in life, they think, we should try to become better people and do the right thing. That is what makes a life go well.
For Mill, the acknowledgment of his or her own fallibility is part of what makes someone a serious thinker. Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that...
The best way to eliminate all suffering in the world would be to eliminate all sentient life. If there were no living things capable of feeling pain, then there would be no pain.
If we silence those who utter falsehoods, we run the risk of becoming dogmatic, of believing without understanding, or feeling passionate about the evidence supporting our beliefs. We also run the ris...
Even if I believe my opinion to be true, and am highly confident about its truth, unless it is ‘fully, frequently and fearlessly’ discussed, I will end up holding it as a dead dogma, a formulaic and u...