Intellect Plus
Ideas & Philosophy
1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 26 of 32.
- Apologetics has nothing to do with saying sorryIn an Athenian courtroom the prosecution delivered the kategoria, the charge, and the accused answered with an apologia, a formal defence. Socrates gave the most famous one. Relig…
- The ancient Greeks had gods, temples and rituals, but no word for religionGreek worship had no scripture, no creed and no central priesthood. What mattered was doing the rituals correctly, not believing the right things. Even gods sharing a name could d…
- Mesopotamian gods got drunk, and scholars have counted about 2,400 of themThe gods of Sumer and Babylon ate, drank and suffered hangovers like people, yet glowed with a terrifying radiance called melammu. A 1938 survey tallied some 2,400 known deities, …
- Angels began as demoted gods, according to biblical scholarsThe Greek angelos just meant messenger, and in early Hebrew texts the equivalent word often described a human prophet. Scholars argue that once Israel's faith became strictly mono…
- A French war minister secretly blocked promotions for officers who attended MassIn 1904 France learned that its war minister, General Louis André, had been deciding army promotions with the help of a card index kept by the Masonic Grand Orient. The files note…
- Apocalypse originally meant revelation, not the end of the worldTo scholars, an apocalypse is not a catastrophe at all. The Greek word means an unveiling: a heavenly messenger shows a human secrets about the cosmos, the past or the future. The…
- The Amazons probably had real models in Scythian women buried with their weaponsGreeks never doubted the Amazons were real, and modern archaeology is finding reasons to agree. Graves across the Eurasian steppe hold women buried with arms, some bearing the inj…
- Anansi the spider crossed the Atlantic and became a hero of resistanceAnansi, the Akan trickster spider, wins by wit against rivals far stronger than himself. Enslaved Africans carried his stories across the Atlantic, and on Caribbean and American p…
- Pythagoras and Plato believed in rebirth long before most Westerners heard of karmaBelief in life after death splits into two great families. In one, the dead travel to another realm, sorted by gods according to how they lived. In the other, they come back in ne…
- A baby is not an agnostic, and philosophers can explain whyThomas Henry Huxley coined the word agnosticism in 1869, from Greek for without knowledge. Philosophers since have insisted it is not simple uncertainty. An agnostic has weighed t…
- Persian kings invited Ahura Mazda to battle in an empty chariotAt the Achaemenid court, the supreme god of Zoroastrianism had no statue. Instead an empty chariot pulled by white horses rolled out with the army, inviting Ahura Mazda to ride al…
- Arab Christians and Jews said Allah before Islam existed, and many still doAllah is simply the Arabic word for God. Pre-Islamic Arab Christians wrote it in inscriptions and poems and reportedly shouted it as a battle cry, and today Arabic-speaking Jews a…
- The word altar probably began as a Latin name for a burning placeAltar comes from Latin altare, probably tied to a verb meaning to burn and nudged by altus, high. That fits its long history as the spot where offerings went up in smoke, from Noa…
- Japan's emperors traced their line to a sun goddess born from an eyeIn the Kojiki, Japan's oldest book, the god Izanagi washes his left eye after a failed trip to the underworld and the sun goddess Amaterasu appears. She is set to rule heaven, and…
- Three world religions trace themselves to Abraham, a figure most historians call legendaryJews revere Abraham as their first patriarch, Christians as Jesus's forebear and spiritual father, Muslims as a prophet in the line leading to Muhammad. Yet most scholars think hi…
- The Iliad never mentions Achilles' heel, or even shows his deathHomer's greatest warrior is never described as invulnerable, and his death happens offstage, outside the poem. The story of Thetis dipping baby Achilles in the Styx while gripping…
- Genesis tells the creation of humans twice, and Adam barely appears againRead Genesis closely and there are two creation stories. In the first, humankind is made in God's image with no names given. In the second, Adam is shaped from dust and Eve from h…
- Over 100 million people across 43 countries still follow Africa's traditional religionsAfrica's indigenous faiths have no single scripture. They live in songs, myths, festivals and the memory of ancestors, who are believed to bless or trouble the living. Even where …
- Odin traded an eye for wisdom, and psychologists now try to measure itIn Norse myth Odin plucked out an eye to buy a drink from the well of knowledge. Humans have prized wisdom for as long as they have written anything down, from Sumerian proverbs t…
- Reading an attack on your worldview can make thoughts of death surfacePatriotic Canadians who read an essay attacking their national values became more likely to complete COFF__ as COFFIN. Psychologists say that is because a worldview, the deep fram…
- Some values people refuse to trade away at any price, and that changes negotiationsAsk someone whether they would take one life to save many, and many will refuse no matter the arithmetic. Philosophers call such commitments protected or sacred values. They sit a…
- Aristotle's golden mean is not the exact middle between two vicesCourage lies somewhere between cowardice and recklessness, Aristotle argued, but not at the halfway point. The right spot shifts with the moment, the person and the purpose. That …
- Western philosophy began when one man declared that everything is waterThales of Miletus was wrong about water, but he reached his answer by observing and reasoning rather than repeating myths. That shift from story to argument launched Western philo…
- Sophist once meant a master craftsman before it became an insultCalling someone a sophist today accuses them of slippery, dishonest argument. In ancient Greek the root word praised skill: charioteers and sculptors could be called wise in their…
- Stoicism is named after a painted porch in the Athens marketplaceAround 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium taught in the open, under a colonnade decorated with battle scenes on the north side of the Athenian Agora. That Painted Porch, the Stoa Poikile, ga…
- To a scientist, a theory is the opposite of a hunchIn daily speech, a theory is a hunch. In science it means nearly the opposite: a well-confirmed explanation of nature, the most rigorous and reliable form of scientific knowledge.…
- Plato thought the table in your kitchen is only a shadowFor Plato, the chair you sit on and the horse in the field are less real than their Forms: perfect, changeless essences that exist beyond space and time. Every physical object onl…
- Thomas Aquinas called Aristotle simply the Philosopher, and built on himA 13th-century Dominican friar took a pagan Greek thinker so seriously that he called him simply the Philosopher. By weaving Aristotle together with Christian theology, Thomas Aqu…
- Galileo probably settled falling bodies with logic, not the Leaning TowerThe familiar picture has Galileo dropping two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. His own 1638 book tells a different story: he proved that heavy and light bodies fall at the …
- Philosophers still cannot agree on what makes something trueEveryone uses the word truth, and a working definition sounds easy: matching reality. Yet philosophers have defended at least half a dozen rival accounts, from correspondence with…
- John Stuart Mill thought he coined utilitarian; Bentham got there firstIn 1861 John Stuart Mill claimed to be the first person to put the word utilitarian into circulation, having picked it up from a novel. He seems not to have known that his predece…
- Socrates called his questioning technique a kind of midwiferySocrates claimed he taught nothing. Instead he asked question after question until his partner either reached a conclusion unaided or tangled themselves in contradiction and admit…
- Santa Claus is not real, but books about him areOne old test for what is real says a thing must be able to make a difference. Gandhi passes: he moved millions. Santa Claus fails, since he cannot act on anything. Yet the childre…
- The Greek word behind reason also meant an account of moneyLogos, the ancient Greek root of logic, could mean speech, explanation, or a financial account. Latin translated it as ratio, which also served for balancing the books. From that …
- Temperature is just molecules moving, and that is reductionism in one lineThe warmth of a gas turns out to be nothing over and above the average energy of its jostling molecules. Explaining a whole by its parts has powered physics, chemistry and molecul…
- Is everything relative? Then that claim must be relative tooThe oldest objection to relativism is a trap: if all truth is relative, is that statement itself relative or absolute? Either answer seems to sink it. Yet the objection only bites…
- Medieval Europe knew only two and a half dialogues of PlatoFor centuries, Western scholars had direct access to just a sliver of Plato's writing. Then fifteenth-century Italy translated him wholesale, and in 1484 Marsilio Ficino published…
- One ancient Greek sceptic refused to speak and just wiggled his fingerCratylus decided that meanings shift so constantly that communication is impossible, so he stopped talking and wagged a finger instead. Few sceptics went that far, but the traditi…
- Pragmatism says an idea means nothing more than what it doesAmerica's homegrown philosophy started in a Cambridge discussion group in the 1870s with a bold test: to understand any concept, list the practical effects it would have, and that…
- Carl Sagan's invisible dragon shows why unfalsifiable claims fail as scienceSuppose someone insists a dragon lives in their garage, but it is invisible, weightless and breathes heatless fire, so every test you propose misses it. Carl Sagan's point was sim…
- Rationalists believed you could discover truths without getting off the couchCan you know something for certain without looking at the world? Rationalists say yes. The number three is prime and bigger than two, so a prime greater than two exists, and no ex…
- Newton's great physics book called itself philosophy, and nobody found that strangeIsaac Newton titled his 1687 masterpiece Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Today we file it under physics. For most of history philosophy covered nearly every kind of…
- You can ask how a burnt finger feels, but not how glutamate feelsIt makes sense to ask what a blue sky looks like or what a burnt finger feels like. Asking what a surge of glutamate in the prefrontal cortex feels like sounds odd, even meaningle…
- Aquinas and Bertrand Russell agreed on the rules for believing in GodThomas Aquinas and Bertrand Russell reached opposite conclusions about God, yet they shared a principle: belief is rational only when backed by sufficient evidence. Their quarrel …
- A well-fed chicken shows why science can never prove its general lawsEvery morning the farmer brings food, so the chicken expects breakfast tomorrow. It is reasonable, and it may be fatally wrong: perhaps the farmer is fattening it up. That small p…
- Plagiarism literally means kidnapping, thanks to an angry Roman poetIn the first century the Roman poet Martial complained that a rival had kidnapped his verses, using the Latin word plagiarius, a kidnapper. The insult stuck. Ben Jonson brought pl…
- Governments are human inventions, which is exactly why political philosophy existsNo form of government comes ready-made from nature. States, constitutions and parliaments are human creations, and anything built can be rebuilt for better or worse. That simple o…
- 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…
- Five years for Madame Bovary—and a trial for immoralityGustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Rouen-born son of a hospital surgeon, became French realism’s emblem. Madame Bovary took five years, appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1856, and land…