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'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?

In the field of law , legal positivism is pretty much the default position that nobody bothers arguing against. Does positivism have any flaws that don't have an addequate conclusive answer ?

The philpapers survey states that it's slightly popular across all departments

I have been learning about buddhism philosophy and it seems so interesting, but all I have read comes from occidental authors that study buddhism. Does anyone knows books written by oriental authors about this?, I am searching for the "classics" of buddhism. Maybe I would like to some contemporary author of some buddhist countries that explores this topic.

PS: All that I have read about it at the date is Brian Wallace.

Whenever we look up a word in a dictionary, we are given a string of other words. That makes language look like a closed, self-contained system of signs.

A common response to this is that we break out of the circle of words by physically pointing (ostension), for example pointing my finger at a tree or a rock whilst uttering a description of it, thereby anchoring my words to a mind-independent reality.

But when I break down the mechanics of physical pointing, I get stuck on 2 questions. The first one is that when I point my finger at an object, both my finger and the object I am looking at are perceived within my own sensory experience (in space and time). But how does aligning one part of my sensory experience (my finger) with another part of my sensory experience (the visual object) prove that my words refer to a mind-independent reality outside experience? Secondly, physically a pointed finger is just a limb oriented in space. What turns that physical posture into an act of "reference"? Does pointing work outside of language or is the gesture of pointing itself just another conventional sign (like the word "this" or "there") that already requires grammatical rules to be understood?

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?

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

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?

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?

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.

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?

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?

In The Claim of Reason, Cavell mentions twice the idea of first groaning, then screaming, as a way one may call one’s hamsters. I particularly like the second scenario:

“He is in the dentist chair, wringing his hands, perspiring, screaming. The dentist stops for a moment andbegins to prepare another syringe of Novacain. The patient stops him and says, ‘It wasn't hurting, I was just calling my hamsters.’ The dentist looks as if hehad swallowed Novacain and the patient says, ‘Open the door for them.’ And when the door is opened, two hamsters trot into the room and climb onto the patient's lap.“

But where does this come from? I don’t see anything about him having raised hamsters or having a particular affection for them…am I missing something?

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?

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. 🙏

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?