Philosophy doesn’t feel real. It seems in our modern world that wisdom is a hoax and truth cannot be attained. Perhaps there is a valid point here that merits exploration. Philosophy is something that is only practiced in university settings, think tanks, or in shorter works like this on the…

There’s an uncertain degree of unreality to our being… — There are times in our lives where our authentic being is not put forward into the world. I’d wager most of our lives are spent in times where our being is inauthentic. I call this inauthenticity the non-reality of our being. We go to jobs where we are playing a…

“Philosophy grew in me through my finding myself in the midst of life itself.” — Karl Jaspers — Philosophy is often thought of as a remote subject to study. We read introductory texts in college or if we’re lucky, high school, but these introductions hardly scratch the surface of philosophical thought. And even if they are taught, they are taught from a history focused or a logic focused…

A Story of the Fragility of Happiness and Pleasure — Some years ago, I was living in New York in a shared apartment with three other people. I had a very small room that was able to fit a twin-sized bed and a desk and it had a very small closet that held my work clothes. I was out in…

O God, Beast, Mystery; Come! — Human culture, since the dawn of humanity, has been kept alive by the flames of mythology. We frame ourselves as living in myth, and we play this out on a psychological level. We even form our societies based on these myths. Every society developed has done this. In philosophical terms…

“Virtue is that perfect good which is the complement of a happy life…” — Seneca — The Stoics posit that virtue is sufficient for a good life, and that all other things are indifferent — though they are split into preferred and non-preferred indifferents, such as housing (which is preferred) or homelessness (which is non-preferred). A Stoic that is true to the doctrine would assert that…

“It is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom…” — It has been posited by Jean-Paul Sartre that when a man realizes his own freedom, he experiences fear and anguish. And he doesn’t mean it in a normal sense of the word — he means it in a core, primal way. He seems to think that anguish is the core…

“Philosophy is like a locked castle with no doors and windows…” — It’s been said that philosophy is like a locked castle with no doors or windows, yet all the “doing” of philosophy happens inside this castle. How does one enter this proverbial castle of philosophy? How should one get started? This is the biggest and often most disorienting question for the…

Exploring Sartre’s Conception of Freedom — Jean-Paul Sartre was a monumental philosopher and prolific writer in the 20th century. He was one of the main thinkers that helped usher in the era of Existentialist thought as the dominant philosophical movement in the last century. William Barrett, in his book Irrational Man, mentions his philosophy by nature…