Philosophy Break

Today on Philosophy Break... Wittgenstein: If a Lion Could Talk, We Could Not Understand Him philosophybreak.com/articles/wittg…

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests the meaning of a language is always rooted in a distinctive “form of life”. If alien intelligences live and perceive the world differently enough, understanding their messages may be forever beyond our reach.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1847)

“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.” — Terry Pratchett

How are we supposed to live when the world feels broken? The Stoics, Toni Morrison, C.S. Lewis, and Jane Goodall on facing uncertain times with collective strength and understanding, rather than isolated fear and despair... philosophybreak.com/articles/the-s…

“Everybody’s hurt,” James Baldwin reminds us. “What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive… philosophybreak.com/articles/james…

The gargantuan scope of the universe need not diminish us, argues the philosopher Robert Nozick. We can identify our lives as part of this vast and continuing natural process. philosophybreak.com/articles/on-li…

Today on Philosophy Break... Iris Murdoch: ‘Unselfing’ is Crucial for Living a Good Life philosophybreak.com/articles/iris-…

The philosopher Iris Murdoch thought our inner lives are too often clogged by the “fat, relentless ego”. By contemplating beauty in nature and art, however, we can deflate this ego (a process Murdoch describes as “unselfing”) and open our eyes to reality.

In Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the popular idea that living well requires a coherent life story. Human life far exceeds the narratives we construct, he argues, and some of us don’t experience ourselves narratively at all. philosophybreak.com/articles/galen…

In Modern Moral Philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe launches a blistering critique on the very concept of ‘morality’. Ethics would be in a better place if we dropped the terms ‘moral’ & ‘immoral’ altogether: we have more precise language to guide us... philosophybreak.com/articles/eliza…

In this brilliant passage from his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, one of Dostoevsky’s characters reflects on how, while our individual pursuits of wealth offer an illusion of safety, they only create more instability and insecurity in the long run... philosophybreak.com/articles/fyodo…

“It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication: 1792

“A quality common to nearly all dictators and one which is characteristic of their manner of judging men in relation to events, is their jealousy...

In his famous and celebrated 1974 paper, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that consciousness poses a unique problem for our standard approaches to explaining the world... philosophybreak.com/articles/thoma…