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The Daily Philosophy
- Posted on Sunday October 11, 2026
“I think we should have a baby.”
Noah whispered softly into the back of Sierra’s neck as they laid in bed on a lazy weekend morning. Sierra took his hand off her hips and pulled it tightly around her waist, snuggling back into him.
“Sounds like a plan, sweetie. We’ll get right on that.”
Noah waited a moment.
“I’m serious,” he finally said. “I think we should have a baby.”
Sierra’s body tensed under his embrace. She slowly unwrapped his arm from around her and turned to face him. “Honey,” she began. “I say this with all of the love and affection I can muster at 7am on a Saturday, but…what the fuck are you talking about?”
Noah rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, don’t act like you’ve never thought about it. It seems like every time we listen to the news, there’s another story about another couple getting uncapped.”
“Well, yes,” Sierra responded, “but that’s because ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday October 10, 2026
Origins explores where we come from: our roots, childhood memories, and the traces of our beginnings. No matter how far we try to go, through the different circumstances of our lives, somehow, even without intending to, we always find ourselves returning to them. The earthy tones emerged instinctively, evoking our homeland and a sense of belonging, while the white lines suggest roots and paths through which we move away and return. – Rossella Vingelli.
Artist’s process documented on Instagram.
Do you have a human-made artwork that you’d like to showcase here? Send it to me along with proof of its creation by a human artist!If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Saturday October 10, 2026
 No philosopher is quoted more often, or more wrongly, than Friedrich Nietzsche. “God is dead.” “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” “There are no facts, only interpretations.” The phrases have escaped their books and live on T-shirts, in song lyrics and in the mouths of film villains. Behind them stands a shy, half-blind, chronically ill classics professor who wrote most of his books alone in cheap boarding houses, sold almost no copies in his lifetime, and spent his last eleven years in a mental darkness from which he never emerged. He wanted, he said, to be “dynamite.” He got his wish, though not in the way he imagined.
Nietzsche is not a philosopher of answers. He is a philosopher who makes it impossible to go on not asking the question.
Who was Nietzsche?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a village in Prussian Saxony, the son ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Friday October 09, 2026
Everyone knows what it is to lie to someone else. But can you lie to yourself? To do so, you would have to know the truth (otherwise you are just mistaken) and at the same time not know it (otherwise you are not deceived). Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi) is his answer to this puzzle – and his diagnosis of the most common way in which human beings run away from their own freedom. It is the central moral idea of Being and Nothingness (1943), and it has become one of the few technical terms of twentieth-century philosophy that people use in everyday conversation.
Bad faith is the attempt to be a thing, by someone who knows perfectly well that they are not one.
What is bad faith?
To understand bad faith, we need two of Sartre’s basic distinctions.
The first is between two kinds of being. A stone, a table ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Thursday October 08, 2026
The Lysis is the shortest and least famous of Plato’s dialogues about love, and the only one devoted entirely to friendship. It is also, by common consent, a failure: after twenty-odd pages of argument, Socrates and two teenage boys admit that they have not been able to say what a friend is. Yet it is a failure that has kept philosophers busy for two and a half thousand years. Every later theory of friendship – Aristotle’s above all – is in some way an attempt to answer the puzzles that this little dialogue leaves hanging in the air on a festival afternoon in Athens.
The Lysis is a dialogue that fails to define friendship while showing us, in every line, what friendship looks like.
The setting
Unlike most of Plato’s works, the Lysis is narrated by Socrates himself, which gives it an unusually intimate, anecdotal tone. He is walking along the road outside ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Wednesday October 07, 2026
Michel Foucault is, by most counts, the most cited author in the humanities and social sciences today – ahead of Marx, Freud, Kant or anyone else. Yet he refused almost every label people tried to pin on him. He was not, he insisted, a structuralist, a postmodernist, a Marxist or even, in the usual sense, a philosopher. He described himself variously as an “archaeologist,” a “genealogist” and a “historian of the present.” What he actually did was take things we assume are simply natural – madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the very idea of a human “self” – and show that each has a history, that each was made rather than found, and that power was at work in the making. Once you have read him, it is hard to look at a hospital, a school, a prison or a confession in quite the same way again.
“My job is making windows ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday October 04, 2026
Existentialism is the one philosophical movement that almost everyone has heard of, and the one philosophers find hardest to define. It conjures black turtlenecks, Paris cafés, cigarettes and gloom. Its slogans – “existence precedes essence,” “hell is other people,” “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” – are quoted far more often than they are understood. And nearly everyone called an existentialist denied being one. Heidegger wrote a whole essay to disown the label. Camus said he and Sartre were always surprised to see their names linked. Kierkegaard died ninety years before the word existed. Only Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ever accepted it – and, as we will see, there is a serious argument that Sartre, of all people, does not belong.
Yet the label stuck, because it names something real: a way of doing philosophy that begins not with the universe, or with logic, or with God, but with the concrete ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Sunday October 04, 2026
For most of its history, philosophy was something you did on foot. Then thinking moved indoors, and we lost something worth walking back to.
Zeno of Elea built a set of arguments to prove that motion is impossible. The arrow in flight, he said, occupies at every instant a space equal to itself, and whatever occupies a space equal to itself is at rest; so the flying arrow does not move. Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, because he must first reach the point the tortoise has left, by which time it has crawled a little further on, and so on without end. The logic is tight. It is also maddening, because you can watch the arrow land and watch Achilles win the race.
The story goes that when someone laid these paradoxes out, Diogenes the Cynic offered no rebuttal. He stood up and walked across the room. As a formal refutation ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Friday October 02, 2026
There is a popular picture, still widespread, in which the “Old Testament God” is a God of law and wrath, and love enters religion only later. The picture does not survive a reading of the Hebrew Bible. The two most famous sentences in Judaism are both about love. The first is recited twice a day by observant Jews and whispered by the dying: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The second was called by Rabbi Akiva “the great principle of the Torah”: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
What is distinctive about Judaism is not that it values love. Every tradition does. It is that Judaism commands love – love of God, love of neighbour, love of the stranger – and then spends two and a half thousand years working out what ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Friday October 02, 2026
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) did something nobody had done before him. He showed that an unarmed people could confront an empire and win – not by begging for its pity, but by making the cost of ruling them morally and politically unbearable. The method he invented for this, satyagraha or non-violent resistance, has since been borrowed by Martin Luther King, by the movement against apartheid, by the crowds who brought down communism in Eastern Europe, and by countless smaller campaigns for dignity and rights.
Gandhi disliked being called a philosopher and insisted there was “no such thing as Gandhism.” But his writings, which run to a hundred volumes, contain a coherent and radical account of truth, non-violence, freedom and the good life, developed through what he called “experiments” conducted on himself. The honorific by which the world knows him, Mahatma (Sanskrit mahātmā, “great soul”), was given to him by others; he ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday September 28, 2026
One day in Sāvatthī, a wealthy woman named Visākhā came to see the Buddha at midday, her hair and clothes still wet from the funeral of her granddaughter. Visākhā was the greatest of the Buddha’s lay patrons, a mother of many children and grandmother of many more, and she had loved the dead girl dearly. The Buddha asked her whether she would like to have as many children and grandchildren as there were people in the city. She said she would. He asked how many people died in Sāvatthī each day. Some days ten, she said, some days one; the city was never free of the dying. “Then would you ever be without wet hair and wet clothes?” No, she admitted. And the Buddha said:
Those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred sorrows. Those who have ninety dear ones have ninety sorrows … Those who have one dear ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday September 28, 2026
 Ask an English speaker what love is and they will struggle, partly because one word has to cover a parent’s tenderness, a lover’s passion, a friend’s loyalty and a saint’s devotion. Sanskrit never had this problem. It has separate words for all of these, and several more besides, and the Hindu traditions built distinct philosophies around each of them.
That is the first thing to know about love in Hinduism: there is no single doctrine, because there is no single Hinduism. The word covers three thousand years of texts, dozens of schools and many gods, and they do not agree about love any more than they agree about anything else. The second thing to know is that, out of this variety, one strand became dominant from roughly the seventh century onwards and has shaped Hindu religious life ever since. It is called bhakti – devotion – and its central claim is ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday September 28, 2026
 In the year 878, in Baghdad, a Sufi named Abū ‘l-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī was put on trial for his life. Among the charges was that he had been heard to say “I passionately love God, and He passionately loves me.” The prosecutor’s objection was not that Nūrī loved God – every Muslim was supposed to do that – but that he had used the wrong word. The verb he chose, ʿashiqa, was the word for the love of a man for a woman: obsessive, bodily, unreasonable. To apply it to God was, in the prosecutor’s view, an indecency bordering on unbelief. Nūrī was acquitted, but the argument he started did not end. Over the next four centuries it produced one of the richest bodies of writing about love in any religious tradition.
That trial is a good way into the subject, because it shows two things at once. First, that love was ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday September 28, 2026
 The word has a faintly musty smell. “Virtue” suggests Victorian sermons, chastity, and people who do not have much fun. It is not a word we reach for when we admire someone. We say they are kind, or brave, or have integrity – but we rarely say they are virtuous, and if we did, it would sound like a joke.
This is a historical accident, and a recent one. For most of the history of Western thought, from the fifth century BCE to the eighteenth century CE, virtue was not one moral idea among others. It was the moral idea – the central concept around which the whole of ethics was organised. The question philosophers asked was not “What should I do?” but “What kind of person should I be?”, and the answer was always given in terms of the virtues. Then, for roughly two centuries, the concept went into eclipse. ... Continue Reading » - Posted on Monday September 28, 2026
 A friend is in hospital. You visit. She is touched, and says so. “Don’t mention it,” you reply. “I worked out that visiting you would produce more overall happiness than anything else I could do this afternoon.” Or: “I recognised that I had a duty to visit, and I always do my duty.”
Something has gone badly wrong, and it is not that you did the wrong thing. You did the right thing. What is missing is you – the friend who visits because she cares about her friend, not because a theory told her to. The philosopher Michael Stocker used this example in 1976 to diagnose what he called the “schizophrenia” of modern ethical theories: they split what we ought to do from what a good person actually feels and wants. Virtue ethics is the attempt to put them back together.
This entry is about that attempt in its modern form. ... Continue Reading »
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