philosophybits:

“All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series

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thirdity:

“Generally we call cruelty that which we do not have the heart to endure, while that which we endure easily, which is ordinary to us, does not seem cruel. Thus what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours. Such weaknesses suppress nothing but make it a difficult task for anyone who seeks in these byways the hidden movement of the human heart.” — Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”

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philosophybits:

“My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-1916

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“To tolerate foolishness much patience is needed. Sometimes we suffer most from those we most depend upon, and this helps us conquer ourselves. Patience leads to an inestimable inner peace, which is bliss on earth.” - Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

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suliqyre:Fairness is our most basic principle of justice. When someone does wrong, we feel they ought to receive a punishment in return, just as when they do good, they ought to receive a reward. Our formal systems of justice are built on this ideal of reciprocity. If someone does something that harms us, we seek justice through a process that is supposed to hold the wrongdoer to account and provide us with a remedy.But we also encounter situations where fairness is profoundly lacking. How, for example, can we ensure fairness between a person born into abject poverty and one born into the opulence of incredible wealth? We might try to introduce laws and programs to reconcile these realities with our idea of fairness, but such efforts are typically too small and limited relative to the scale of the injustice.The simple fact is that we are forced to live with a degree of injustice as long as the systems that produce and maintain injustices continue to exist. Our lives will not be fair, despite our belief that they should be.Read more…

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[Revised entry by Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie on July 10, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, towards the end of 1945 and the culmination […]

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philosophybits:

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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[Revised entry by Maarten Franssen, Ibo van de Poel, Michael Klenk, and Filippo Santoni de Sio on July 10, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] If philosophy is the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Wilfrid Sellars […]

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[Revised entry by Adam Omelianchuk and David DeGrazia on July 10, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The definition of death involves matters of philosophy and public policy. The philosophical investigation of death has focused primarily on two questions: What is human death? and How can we determine that it has occurred? A third […]

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“Unless we are willing to revive Platonic and Aristotelian notions about grasping universals, we shall not think that knowledge of general truths is made possible by some special, metaphysically distinctive, ingredient in human beings. Unless we wish to revive the seventeenth century’s somewhat awkward and inconsistent use of the Aristotelian notion of “substance” we shall not make sense of the notion of two ontological realms — the mental and the physical. Unless we wish to affirm […] the claim that a distinctive metaphysical property of “presence to consciousness” grounds some of our noninferential reports of our states — we shall not be able to use the notion of “entities whose appearance exhausts their reality” to bolster the mental-physical distinction.” - Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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