☰Philosophy

Eighty-one short chapters arguing that yielding outlasts force and that the most effective action often looks like restraint.

Private notes on Stoic practice, written by an emperor to himself and never intended to be read by anyone.

Practical Stoicism delivered as correspondence — on time, wealth, fear and the shortness of a life spent badly.

Doubts everything doubtable to find one certainty, and hands modern philosophy both its starting point and its mind-body problem.

Opens with suicide as the only serious philosophical problem and answers it by accepting the absurd without appeal.

Science advances by paradigm shifts rather than accumulation, and competing paradigms are not fully commensurable.

Subjective character of experience resists any objective physical account, which is the sharpest form of the mind-body problem.

If suffering counts morally, it counts regardless of species — the argument that created the modern animal ethics debate.

The good life is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is a disposition trained by habit rather than taught by rule.

Without a common power life is a war of all against all, so subjects rationally trade liberty for security — the founding social contract argument.

Grounds morality in what any rational agent must will universally, and rules out treating a person merely as a means.

Attacks the assumption that moral categories are given rather than made, and asks whose interests each morality has served.

Theories are scientific only if they forbid something; confirmation is cheap and falsifiability is the real criterion.

Locates art in the experience of encountering it rather than in the object, which puts the museum and the well-made chair on the same footing.

Meaning is use, not reference; most philosophical problems are grammatical confusions dressed as deep questions.

Follows self-reference through logic, art and music to argue that meaning and mind emerge from formal systems looping back on themselves.

Names refer by causal chain rather than description, which makes some truths necessary but discoverable only by experiment.

Builds an ideal city to answer what justice is in a person, and produces the cave allegory along the way.

Causation is a habit of expectation rather than an observed necessity, and induction has no non-circular justification.

Argues from Gödel that human understanding is not algorithmic, and that minds must therefore exploit physics computers do not.