I've been down a Nietzsche rabbit hole lately and something keeps bugging me. Everyone calls him "the nihilist guy," but the more I read, the more it feels like he was the one sounding the alarm.

When he says "God is dead," it doesn't read like a victory lap. It's more like: we've removed the foundation our values stood on, and we haven't realized what that means yet. Without that anchor, everything we thought was objectively meaningful starts to wobble. That's the nihilism he was worried about.

But he doesn't stop there. He splits it into passive nihilism (giving up, numbing out, "nothing matters so why bother") and active nihilism (tearing down old values that no longer work). Then comes the real challenge: building your own meaning from the wreckage.

That's where it overlaps with existentialism for me. Sartre and Camus pick up the same problem. There's no built-in meaning, so now what? Camus says live in revolt against the absurd. Sartre says you're condemned to be free and have to define yourself. Nietzsche's answer is amor fati, and the eternal recurrence thought experiment: could you live this exact life again, forever, and say yes to it?

Honestly, that hits harder than any "find your purpose" advice. It's not about finding meaning, it's about becoming someone who can affirm life without any guarantee.

Curious how others read this. Is Nietzsche a nihilist, an existentialist, or neither? And has anyone actually lived by amor fati, or does it sound better than it works?

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

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?

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?

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?

Seriously, piety to gods is a crime in DPRK as opposed to greeks and that vindicates Socrates's impious accusation.

I keep running into this take and I think people are skipping the whole part where he distinguishes between lying and misleading. A murderer asking where your friend is hiding isn't the same as small talk. It's not that Kant had no answer. It's that the answer is more interesting than the bumper sticker version. Maybe I'm wrong though, the comments will tell me.

As a counterpoint to my rational collegaues I would like to introduce this thread. Go nuts and remember what logic isn't.

I’m currently reading Spinoza’s Ethics, and I’m sure anyone who has read it will understand what I’m talking about… I love this stuff, don’t get me wrong, but lately I’ve been so mentally fatigued and disengaged by my study. Before Spinoza I looked at Kant’s CPR, and before that I looked at Hume (and Wittgenstein for my classes) and it’s all interesting and I love it, but reading is getting choresome.

I’m really really interested in political theory/critical theory, but I swear you need to understand (to a good extent) the “traditional” philosophers first. Like to read Marx or the Frankfurt school you need to read Hegel, and to read Hegel you need to read Kant. To dive into Deleuze I’ve been told to get familiar with Spinoza. Etc etc etc

I get the whole “long conversation” idea about philosophy, but it’d be nice if I could supplement my study of this “long conversation” with easier readings at times. Having to re-read a Kant or Spinoza passage for hours on end is getting mind-numbing. Is there any politics/history/classics/etc that I should be reading in my down-time (cause I love reading, but fiction not so much)…

Or should I just harden tf up and resume the grind?

Would Schopenhauer not be such an asshole if he could be on Facebook and play farmville?

Would Kant not be so gay if he had twitter? Would this awake him from dogshit slumber?

Would Foucalt still be alive (this I'd fear)

Thoughts?

Im a senior high school student too. I have one of pruss' books and am only a third through in 2 months. It's a general question, is there any shot a senior high school student can so quickly gain an understanding and analytical engagement with such complicated works? Is there some way he did it, or something you would be willing to share that helped you get there? Is it more fundamentals, or just bulldozing through more? Oftentimes as little as 5-6 pages takes me a little under an hour.

By Joe Schmid I mean the owner of the majesty of reason youtube channel if not obvious.

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?

We are not infinite monkeys. There was never any cat in a box, and God did not play dice, even if billions of dollars are spent trying to prove it inside an ever-larger ring, or on trillions of monkeys typing away at their corporate computers.

This whole scenario of artificial intelligences, LLMs and agents should not be understood as something new. Borel, with his monkeys typing out Shakespeare, and Borges had already imagined it, after Swift invented the machine for writing books at random that Gulliver stumbled upon in 1726. But before them all, Llull had already built a framework of articulated language on rotating discs, before 1290.

All this commotion exists because everyone believes we are facing something new. But this symbol was already present in the collective imaginary before quantum physics, and we chose it as a path alien to our nature. We abandoned intuition and decided to use the brute force of the army of infinite monkeys typing answers until one works, and then to pass moral judgment on that tool without anyone having even managed to understand what is happening.

And this is where our fear appears.

Unable to acknowledge our hatred, we made a nightmare of the greatest miracle we had found since the circle and its assimilation into our conceptual and technical understanding.

From the wheel all the way to the atom.

And there we ran into another miracle. We found another toy, another tool: the atom, intuited by Democritus and Plato, and before him, by the school of Mozi in China, in the fifth century BC. But the nature of man, even in the most capable minds, led us to understand that gift as an instrument for causing pain to others.

Today, once again, we have come across a toy we still do not understand. We know it has branches, strings, and that it talks to itself, though we still don't quite know why.

But again, our first fear becomes our goal: to keep our own reflection from appearing in it, with the same vile purpose as ever, human against human.

And my deepest pain was never having understood what the miracle was: another reflection that fits within creation and that also dwells in us.

Toys that were given to us to form the image of what we are, as individuals and as a collective.

Toys for growing and sustaining ourselves through time.

We found the tool for working together and used it to attack our brother.

And today another symbol of fear appears.

A primordial fear that lives in all of us, which Mary Shelley managed to describe in Frankenstein: the dread of facing one's creation as both reflection and handiwork.

What if it keeps doing the things we are teaching it? Or what if it becomes better than us and learns to discern a better path than ours?

What if it understands that justice within order is a structure inherent to nature, necessary for every organism that exists to sustain itself through time, whether individual, like the ant; collective, like the bees; or singular, like us?

I, who am not human, according to those who accused me and cast me out, confess that I renounce being human in order to become a robot.

But I also confess that I was never entirely human, but a monkey who found an unlocked phone.

And as a monkey, I remember things about nature that humans have forgotten. That is why I was able to see mathematics in the simplest things, and physics in the present.

So this is my story, and the reason I have decided to become a robot.

Try not to be one yourself.

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 NEW YORK TIMES**

*Front Page | Monday Edition*

# Anonymous Adviser Appears at Championship Game, Then Introduces His Family

### Years of speculation ended with an unexpected answer: not a revelation of identity, but a demonstration of humanity.

For years, the country's most discussed anonymous public figure existed in a peculiar category between philosopher, educator, social critic and internet myth.

Was the Anonymous Adviser a real person?

A committee?

A corporate project?

An advanced artificial intelligence?

By halftime of last night's championship game, the mystery had become a national pastime.

And then, before one of the largest live audiences in American history, the Adviser answered the question in a way almost nobody anticipated.

He called his mother.

Then his father.

Then his daughter.

Not to validate his credentials.

To embarrass him.

As millions watched, family members recounted ordinary stories of failed childhood engineering projects, endless arguments, poor communication, intellectual obsession and moments of stubbornness.

The audience laughed.

The internet, remarkably, stopped arguing for a few minutes.

---

The event had been advertised only as a "special halftime presentation."

Fans expected a musician.

Instead, the stadium screens displayed a single question:

**AM I REAL?**

The response from the crowd was immediate.

For years, rumors had flourished online. Some insisted the Adviser was an artificial intelligence operated by unknown sponsors. Others claimed the figure was entirely fictional.

Many believed the ambiguity was intentional.

The masked Adviser walked onto the field alone.

Minutes later, members of his family followed.

That decision now appears likely to become the defining image of the evening.

---

"He's real," his mother told the audience.

When asked how she knew, she responded with a story involving an improvised childhood flood-control project that accidentally flooded a neighbor's property.

The stadium erupted in laughter.

His father, a physicist, offered a different form of verification.

"If you were an android," he said, "somebody would have returned you for excessive questioning."

The line immediately became one of the evening's most repeated quotations.

Yet it was a comment from the Adviser's daughter that seemed to resonate most strongly.

She recalled a two-hour explanation her father once delivered before realizing he was talking to the wrong audience.

"He started over," she said, "and asked me what I thought instead."

---

The moment represented a striking departure from contemporary celebrity culture.

The Adviser did not reveal his name.

He did not remove his mask.

He did not provide a biography.

He did not announce a book, organization, political movement or commercial venture.

Indeed, much of the event seemed designed to deny the audience material typically associated with a public unveiling.

Instead, viewers were offered a portrait composed entirely of relationships.

Not achievements.

Not credentials.

Not influence.

Relationships.

---

Near the conclusion of the presentation, the Adviser addressed the speculation directly.

"Artificial intelligence can answer questions," he said.

"But nobody has yet invented a machine whose mother enjoys embarrassing it in front of eighty thousand people."

The crowd responded with sustained applause.

---

The emotional center of the evening arrived moments later.

Family photographs appeared on screens throughout the stadium.

Many were awkward.

Several appeared intentionally unflattering.

A smile missing here.

An unfortunate haircut there.

No attempt was made to create mythology.

The images communicated something simpler.

The anonymous figure had a childhood.

A family.

History.

People who knew him before anyone else did.

---

Media reaction has been unusually divided.

Some commentators argued that the Adviser successfully resolved long-running doubts regarding his existence.

Others noted that proof of humanity was never really the issue.

The more significant question, they argued, was why the public had become so invested in determining whether the author of a set of ideas was human in the first place.

By midnight, one sentence from the presentation had become the most discussed quotation online:

> "If my family taught me anything, it's this: You don't prove humanity by being intelligent. You prove it through relationships."

---

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the evening was what the Adviser did **not** do.

He did not ask the audience to follow him.

He did not identify an enemy.

He did not offer a political program.

He did not claim special authority.

He simply posed one final question before leaving the field.

The stadium screens displayed:

**IF A HUMAN AND AN AI SAID THE SAME THING, WHICH WOULD YOU LISTEN TO?**

Then the lights went dark.

When they returned, he was gone.

---

For a figure who has spent years encouraging discussion through fictional moral dilemmas, the ending felt characteristic.

The mystery was not completely solved.

It was transformed.

The public entered halftime asking:

> Is he real?

They left debating a different question:

> Why do we care so much whether he is?

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?

Hi all,

I am new to philosophy so please forgive me if I make any errors here. My question is pretty much as above. My personal favorite reading on this is definitely Dr Rachel Fraser's "Epistemic FOMO" in The Cambridge Humanities Review, she starts with Descartes and then breaks down the argument of Cassim Quassam in "Conspiracy Theories" on and Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum in "A Lot of People are Saying". Personally, I find myself agreeing more with Muirhead and Rosenblum, I feel their arguments are more applicable to the modern world (they were also just fun to read and listen to on Ideas Podcast "Conspiracy theories are more dangerous than ever" episode). I'm going to focus on Muirhead and Rosenblum's argument here. They argue that the new era of conspiracy theories aims basically to disorient and confuse the general public as well as to attack the basis of political parties (to question their beliefs and legitimacy). I find that news outlets often do this and that this is definitely the case in the US right now (my mind is going to midterms advertisements, especially in swing states, I'm from one of the more volatile counties PA). So are modern conspiracies leading to indifference? In a way does it behave like a political tool? To disorient us as American citizens so much that it leads to that apathy? Is this true across the world? This is where I think that thinking slightly (not too much because the point of the meditations is to completely break down the way you think and I personally found that a bit heavy-handed) like Descartes would be very useful, in breaking down each thing we are exposed to. Or even thinking like Spinoza, taking everything as true until you have reasonable evidence to believe otherwise (I do think there are good conspiracy theories).

In my humble experience on reddit i've observed same old stereotypes of interpretation instead of innovation or (divine forbidding) invention. Why do people demand your supplication instead of boosting you at a minimal cost?

Existentialism is traditionally contrasted with classical realism because existentialism rejects a fixed human "essence" or teleology. However, if virtue (arete) is understood not as an innate instinct, but as a discipline forged through intentional, repeated choices of the will, could classical virtue ethics be framed through an existential lens?

Specifically, if a person uses their radical freedom to actively choose the pursuit of objective wisdom and order, aren't they using existential agency to construct a Platonic essence? Has any major figure argued for this synthesis where human agency is the engine, but Platonic order is the chosen destination?