Philosophy

Why did you choose this way? Because he thought that philosophy was neither poetry nor opinion.

Close your eyes and look for your self. That permanent center that is you. Look carefully. A friendly, chubby Scotsman did that same exercise nearly three hundred years ago — and didn't find it. What he found instead was one of the most unsettling idea...

The most powerful man in the world wrote a private journal every night that he never intended to publish: he challenged himself not to be an idiot, reminded himself he was going to die, and braced for setbacks before they arrived. Two thousand years la...

A man whose master broke his leg responded without screaming and without losing his composure. Not because he was unfeeling, but because he had found something no master can take from anyone: control over one's own inner response. Epictetus went from s...

In 1841, a young Dane returned the ring to the woman he loved without giving her any explanation she could understand — and spent the rest of his life writing about that decision. Kierkegaard didn't build a philosophical system: he built a question tha...

What if everything you believe you are as a woman wasn't truly yours — but something installed in you from childhood before you ever had a choice? Simone de Beauvoir answered that question with an eight-word sentence that scandalized the Vatican, sold ...

Twenty-five hundred years ago, a Greek philosopher who died buried in manure left behind an idea we still haven't managed to refute: nothing is static, everything changes, and clinging to what will inevitably change is the surest path to suffering. Her...

For centuries, Epicurus was blamed for a philosophy of excess and indulgence he never actually taught. The real Epicurus lived in a modest house eating bread and water, and his idea of pleasure was almost the opposite of what we've been told: not more,...

At twenty-three, Spinoza was expelled from his community with the harshest excommunication recorded in modern Jewish history. No one knows exactly what ideas brought him to that point — but what he thought and wrote after that exile permanently changed...