Intellect PlusPhilosophy
492 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 9.
Brazil's flag carries a slogan borrowed from a French philosopher's science religionOrder and Progress, the motto on Brazil's flag, comes from Auguste Comte's positivism, which held that real knowledge must rest on experience and scientific law. Comte went on to …
Plato wondered whether a pious name suits an impious manIn Plato's Cratylus, a man called Theophilus, meaning god-beloved, poses a puzzle: if names were pure convention, no name could ever be wrong, yet calling an irreligious man god-b…
Prime factorisation waited over 2,000 years to secure internet bankingAncient mathematicians studied prime factors for their own sake. More than two thousand years later the same idea became the backbone of RSA encryption. Ellipses, likewise, sat in…
Before 1962, paradigm was mostly a grammar term for verb tablesIn 1900 Merriam-Webster defined paradigm only as a grammar term, the model for conjugating verbs. Then Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions turned it into one of …
A puzzle about barbers helped expose a crack in the foundations of mathematicsDoes the barber who shaves exactly those men who do not shave themselves shave himself? Either answer contradicts itself. Riddles like this are more than party tricks: Russell's v…
After ten thousand Stanford trials, the verdict on telepathy was pure chanceIn 1911 Stanford became the first American university to test telepathy and mind-over-matter in a laboratory. After roughly 10,000 experiments, psychologist John Edgar Coover foun…
Phenomenology asks how anything can be objective when all experience is subjectiveEvery perception you have is yours alone, yet we talk confidently about an objective world. Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology in the early 20th century to tackle that puzzle, b…
Newton never called himself a scientist; the word did not exist yetIsaac Newton's masterpiece of 1687 was titled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, because physics, chemistry and astronomy were all branches of philosophy then. The wor…
The first Greek naturalists were nicknamed simply the nature peopleLong before modern science, thinkers like Thales and Democritus explained the world without gods, and their peers dubbed them the physikoi, from the Greek word for nature. Natural…
Nihilism is not one idea but a whole family of denialsSome nihilists deny that life has any purpose. Others deny objective morality, or knowledge, or even that tables exist, since only particles are real. The word, built from Latin f…
Does the colour green exist, or only green things? Ontology still arguesSocrates was one of a kind; the colour green turns up everywhere. Is green a real thing in its own right, an idea in our heads, or nothing at all? Ontology, the philosophy of bein…
An opinion backed by facts and principles quietly becomes something stronger: an argumentTwo people can accept exactly the same facts and still reach opposite conclusions. That gap is where opinion lives. Yet opinions are not all equal: one can be better supported tha…