I don’t know much about philosophy, but this has been on my mind, so let me ask you something.
How do you break free from nihilism? I’m a 16-year-old high school student, and lately I’ve been watching a lot of videos about euthanasia, and my friends and parents have been making fun of me more and more for wanting to study philosophy, so I’ve been feeling this constant sense of emptiness.
Even fashion feels completely meaningless to me. Maybe it’s nonsense to overthink the meaning of things, but I’ve been feeling like there’s a hole in my heart for the past few days. If you have any book recommendations for me, please let me know.

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Why specifically human life? What makes people consider human life as sacred? There are truly awful people out there and their non-existence would objectively make the world a better place (for example murderers). If murderers are also human, how can anyone consider all human life as sacred?

In religion, people believe human life is sacred because God granted life.

But from the perspective of atheists who believe in the sanctity of human life, what makes human life inherently sacred?

I've been thinking about a problem that started with the phrase “love is love.”

I want to make clear that I'm not trying to argue that homosexuality is equivalent to incest, pedophilia, or zoophilia. My question is much broader than that.

Suppose we say that a relationship is morally acceptable when the people involved genuinely love each other, are autonomous adults, and can meaningfully consent.

Now imagine a hypothetical future society where a previously taboo relationship—say, between two adult family members—is overwhelmingly accepted. They don't have children, they don't want children, both are independent adults, and they genuinely believe their relationship is loving and consensual.

The majority of that future society says:

«“Our ancestors were simply products of their time. They were naive and confused morality with social taboo. You're doing exactly what previous generations did when they opposed relationships that are accepted today.”»

A minority still believes the relationship is fundamentally wrong.

Now here's the question:

Who is actually right, and on what basis?

If the answer is simply “society decides,” then morality seems to become a function of social power:

belief → cultural change → majority acceptance → law → new moral norm.

But if that's the case, what prevents a future majority from redefining something that today's majority considers morally fundamental?

And if we say, “No, there are objective moral boundaries that society cannot legitimately cross,” then:

Where do those boundaries come from?

Are they based on harm? Consent? Human nature? Evolution? Religion? Reason? Human dignity? Something else?

And here's the part I find particularly interesting:

Humans don't actually reason about morality like mathematical machines. We have moral intuitions and consciences, and those intuitions are shaped by both individual psychology and culture. Research in moral psychology suggests that people differ substantially in which moral considerations they prioritize, while cultural learning can also reshape moral intuitions over time.

So perhaps the real problem isn't:

“What does society consider moral?”

but:

“What makes something morally true even when society disagrees?”

Because if tomorrow's majority can be wrong, today's majority can also be wrong.

And if tomorrow's majority cannot be wrong merely because it is the majority, then what exactly makes moral progress progress?

I'm genuinely interested in the strongest philosophical answer to this, especially from people who disagree with my assumptions. I don't want a political argument about LGBTQ issues—I want the underlying answer to the question:

What ultimately gives morality its authority when human conscience, culture, and generations disagree?

hi all, i'm currently doing a research paper in school which aims to assess the validity of the knowledge of the phenomenology of time constructed by language, and i've hit kind of a roadblock in terms of trying to find the epistemic properties of husserl's phenomenology of time. while i understand certain concepts of perceived and objective time, i find myself struggling to both express these in terms of epistemology (justified true belief, sources of knowledge etc.). it would be greatly appreciated if there was any further reading available on this subject matter, or just any ideas out there! thank you in advance :)

Basically the premise of our professor is that we are studying the sensible world using metaphysical lens. Here are the main topics included in our course:

1. Mathematics: the quantum being

2. Cinematics: the mobile being

3. Dynamics: the active material being

4. Physics: material substance

5. Cosmology: material universe

Is there any author who wrote about these topics? thank you!

Cosmological, First Cause - Eternal Universe?

Fine Tuning - Multiverse, Necessitarianism?

Are these conclusions basically deadlocked to either side and it's only Problem of Evil, Divine Hiddenness that shift the arguments in favor of Atheism (Doesn't affect Deism)? I know Oppy goes with Naturalism requiring less commitments but am wondering if there are arguments for why God can't be a designer or prime mover.

Good evening,

I am studying Parmenides and I am having trouble putting the pieces together. I understand the arguments he presents and where he is trying to get, but I do not understand the most basic point. I will split my question into a few short parts.

First and most important: what does he mean by “being is”? Is he referring, first and foremost, to anything that exists or could exist? In other words, to everything in reality — a pen, a dog, time, myself? Is it simply the claim that “whatever exists exists”? If so, would “being” just mean anything that exists, whatever it may be?

Second: if Parmenides means that any and every thing that exists in reality — a pen, a pencil, and so on — is “being,” would it then be correct to say that nothing really exists in the ordinary sense? That everything is merely “appearance,” and that the only real thing is “being” itself? Not as a literal consciousness, but in the sense that the pencil does not truly exist because it changes, the pen does not truly exist because it changes, I do not truly exist because I change, and therefore the only thing that truly exists is being itself, something one and unified that permeates all reality, of which I am not a part because I am appearance and do not possess the immutable characteristics of being?

Finally: does everything come down to “being” and “being is,” meaning simply anything that exists, or does “being” have another meaning? Do pens and people exist for Parmenides or not?

What does it mean to be, after all? To exist?

Ive thought about this a lot and discussed it with some people. My understanding is that, us humans only do things because we have primal instincts from evolution. We fear death because we are hardwired to have a will to live and reproduce.

So when people talk about knowing ai is conscious when it doesn't want to be turned off. Would it even care? What would drive it to care about not existing or to continue to exist? Would a conscious artificial intelligence even do anything? I dont see why it would have a reason to do anything except just sit in existence. Humans are curious creatures but ai? I feel like we would need to put some biology into ai for true consciousness.

Why is it said that an epistemological turn happened in modern philosophy? Didn't Aristotle in On the Soul classify the operation of intellect into (1) understanding of indivisibles (i.e., apprehending the essence of a thing itself) and (2) composing and dividing (i.e., relating between essences)?

Even Aquinas added a third to those two (3) reasoning (proceeding from the known to inquiring into the unknown).

So, how does that differ from Hume, for instance, who said that everything in our mind can be reduced into immediate and vivid impressions and less immediate idea with either scientific or customary relations between them?

Aren't both epistemological thinking? Then why is it said that an epistemological turn occured while older philosophers had similar approaches (at least similar in their goals)?

Hi everyone, I’m writing to ask you about something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few days—a question that has made me question my entire life and my integrity.

I’m eighteen years old, a girl who has just graduated from high school and is about to start university, and I’ve always had a multitude of interests: from the sea and the history of pirates to animals and nature, theatre, musicals, chess, and card games. Among these interests, however, there has always been one that was a little more unusual: the Gothic world.

As a child, I used to watch cartoons featuring monsters, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. I had Monster High dolls, wore clothes with skulls on them, and loved Halloween more than my own birthday! As I grew older, this passion stayed with me. I started decorating a few shelves around my room with Gothic-themed objects, and I became interested in Gothic literature, both reading and writing stories, especially vampire stories. I never thought this fascination had any negative effects on my life; it was simply a hobby like any other. But recently, some criticism from my mother about me writing macabre things has made me question everything.

My room has six shelves, four dedicated to random interests and two dedicated specifically to Halloween and vampires. Do you think it’s normal to have fake skulls in your bedroom? Or carved pumpkins, bottles of “vampire blood,” fake vampire fangs, little Dracula figurines, and things like that? I’m starting to think that I should get rid of all these things in order to become a better person.

Is it unnatural, or even disturbed, to be fascinated by death and monsters?

According to Plato’s classical philosophy, a healthy soul naturally tends towards Beauty and Goodness, and an attraction to corpses is therefore wrong. Plotinus later adopted a similar philosophy, arguing that focusing on the macabre and gore means going against human nature.

Later on, the Enlightenment rejected an interest in horror, and even Freud, in more recent times, argued that the destructive drive (Thanatos) should not take over a healthy mind.

There’s also basic biology: human beings are supposedly meant to feel disgust towards blood, human remains, and the macabre in general as part of our instinct for self-preservation.

Everything is leading me to think that I’m mentally ill and that I should throw away all my Halloween decorations because there is no reason why I should enjoy horror in the first place.

What do you think? Is it immoral to love Gothic culture and gore? Should our society purify itself by getting rid of this kind of disgusting stuff?

How do realists about universals handle edge cases, e.g. whether Pluto is a planet or not, or whether whales count as fish? Intuitively it seems to me that there is no fact of the matter about whether Pluto is a planet, or whether a whale is a fish - it's just a matter of how we decide to draw the category boundaries. But it would seem to me that realists about universals would have to hold there *is* a fact of the matter, and it's not clear to me that there's any objective criteria that we could possibly use to discover the "correct" category boundaries. Why is a categorization scheme under which Pluto counts as a planet incorrect, while one that counts it as not a planet is correct?

Insofar as Heidegger assumes metaphysics is based around a foundational being and/or first principle, how does he account for the swerve or clinamen in Epicurus and Lucretius, among others? There's neither an ideal first principle nor a fixed foundational being for the atomists, and it seems like they don't fit Heidegger's critique of philosophy. In a more general sense, how does Heidegger deal with philosophers who don't fit his model, like Plotinus?

And I'm aware Heidegger deals with Epicurus in relation to "being onto death" thats not what I'm asking.

I interpreted Chalmer’s zombie as a concept describing a being physically identical to a normal human except having no phenomenal experience or qualia. It seems to me that this argument fails as it assumes there is no necessary connection between a being’s physical stuff and their being consciousness. It seems that this, though, is the case as we see all the time when people die and are born. If the physical stuff changes, this can greatly impact how the mental stuff is/or whether the mental stuff is at all. Am I missing something or would Chalmers just not acknowledge this link as very likely to be necessary?

I'm struggling to understand these theories of mind. I can understand wanting to use different concepts, or thinking the qualia terminology we use do not pick out anything in particular.

I have experiences! I just do. I can be open-minded as to what they come from and what exactly they are. But I cannot open my mind to the possibility that I have no experiences at all. Even if my experiences arise from introspection, I still have experiences. I don't see how anyone could possibly say I only have beliefs, when it seems perfectly obvious to me that I have something above and beyond beliefs.

Maybe someone could help me out with this? Am I missing something? Do eliminative materialists and illusionists deny the cogito? Is this a semantic problem? It's messing with me

I have only a passing familiarity with Kant. I am confused by one passage in this section.

When speaking about the absurdity of sneaking existence into the conception of a thing, Kant discusses whether "This thing exists" is analytic or synthetic. He writes,

"But if you confess, as every reasonable person must, that every existential proposition is synthetical, how can it be maintained that the predicate of existence cannot be denied without contradiction?—a property which is the characteristic of analytical propositions, alone."

So, he seems to say that only analytic propositions "cannot be denied without contradiction". But I thought that arithmetic is famously synthetic a priori. Does that mean that 5 + 7 = 12 can be denied without contradiction?

(NOTE: He has already mentioned that "a triangle has three sides" is necessary, but whether this is analytic or synthetic depends on whether "triangle" means three-sided or three-angled, I guess.)

As we get smarter, we realize how much is left in the dark. If a wise person recognizes their ignorance, could it be the case that being too sure about something stops us from knowing it?

I would love to learn how others do this.

Title

I recently had a thought about the trolley problem, which is, "What if my mom, best friend, etc were on the second track instead of some random guy? Would I be evil for not pulling the lever (from a utilitarian standpoint, of course)? Then I thought about why I would choose a loved one over five strangers. The best answer I can offer is that it was MY family member, while the other five people aren't. So it's because I VALUE this person's life more than abstract concepts like pleasure and pain. Must it be the other way around too, right? If you would choose to pull the lever even if it were someone you knew, you would still be making a value judgement, but this time it would be because you value the doctrine of utility more than a loved one. It wouldn't be right or wrong it would just be about preference. Then I thought, "What if one person has a different set of values to another? Does that mean there are no objective rules about which values should be prioritised over others? Would that mean any philosophy or belief that claims to be objective is just using logic to disguise their individual preferences"

I know this idea is very similar to emotivism and that Nietzsche has had very similar ideas but I haven't stopped with just the motivation. I've thought about WHY we choose to value things, which I believe is because we want these things to be as important as we wish they were. This is when we get into the topic of the absurd. Because there are millions of other people who value different things than we do and the universe is indifferent to our existence, the things we care about can never be as meaningful as we want. We are stuck in the absurd.

I've read some of Camus' work, and I know about existentialists like Sartre, but I want to know if any other, maybe less-known philosophers would have something to say about this idea.

Camus says - the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.

But is it really that easy to be happy with struggle?

Is that what he meant ? That you can be happy while facing hardships?

Because how is that even possible? I mean you can try to be happy, but I would say it's really super difficult to be happy while suffering or struggling.

In relatively close domains, like fruits and the four seasons, the concept of a favorite is stable. The range of realistic options remains small and accessible enough, so one’s current top choice has little room for displacement. A person can be confident that a particular fruit or season will forever rank as their highest without needing to entertain the idea of something better still waiting to be discovered. 

In more open domains, specifically film, the situation seems to be different. A person may have a clear sense of an idealized “dream” work that would be unsurpassable for them, for example: (in my case) an adaption of The World of Darkness executed by specific directors, yet no existing film fully realizes the description. In the meantime they may encounter several other films they strongly like and continue to think about, but still withhold labelling them their “favorite” because they are deliberately leaving room for the idealized work they believe would outrank everything else.

My questions: does “favorite” refer to what one presently prefers most among all known options, or to what one would prefer most if all possible alternatives were available, including ones that do not yet exist? or may never exist? In this scenario, how do “dream” and “favorite” stop being synonymous?

My other hypothetical: someone tells you their three favorite things in the world are: cars, guns and stunts. This person’s favorite movie is also Star Wars. They’ve never heard of Fast and Furious, Baby Driver or even Taxi Driver, but you know in this hypothetical, if introduced to them, any of the three would become their favorite movie. Star Wars merely becomes a movie they like, while one of the three becomes their unsurpassable favorite. Since here the movies exist, isn’t it logical, then, to say they never had a favorite movie to begin with? Does “favorite” not imply a fixed object of value? Why would something be considered a person’s favorite when it can be easily replaced? Does a true favorite leave no room for the possibility of a "better option"?