philosophy

In 399 BCE, Athens convicted its most famous philosopher of impiety and corrupting the youth — a verdict that has troubled Western philosophy ever since, because the city was probably not entirely wrong about what Socrates was doing.

By The Freethinking Times 5 min read

First articulated by Philippa Foot in 1967 and extended by Judith Jarvis Thomson, the trolley problem forces a choice between killing one person to save five, exposing deep tensions in moral theory.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read

If every plank of Theseus' ship is gradually replaced, is it still the same ship? The oldest thought experiment in the Western tradition poses questions about identity, persistence, and what it means for anything — a ship, a person, an institution — to remain itself through change.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a tiny creature that could sort fast and slow molecules, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics — a puzzle that took a century to resolve and transformed our understanding of information, entropy, and the physical basis of knowledge.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read

John Searle's 1980 thought experiment argues that a system manipulating symbols according to rules cannot be said to understand or have genuine intelligence, however convincingly it mimics comprehension.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read

A contemporary version of Descartes' demon: if your brain were in a vat being fed artificial signals, how could you know? The scenario sharpens foundational questions about knowledge, reference, and the limits of radical skepticism.

By The Freethinking Times 6 min read

Skepticism is the philosophical position that holds that knowledge claims — particularly those about the external world, God, morality, or the past — require scrutiny, and that many claims commonly accepted as knowledge fail to meet the standards that genuine knowledge demands.

4 min read

Secular humanism is a philosophical life stance that affirms human dignity, reason, and ethics without reference to the supernatural — holding that human beings can live well and act rightly on the basis of natural capacities alone.

3 min read

Rationalism is the philosophical position that reason, independent of sensory experience, is the primary source of knowledge — and that the most important truths about reality are those that can be arrived at through pure thought.

4 min read

Pantheism is the metaphysical view that God and the universe are identical — that there is no transcendent creator standing apart from creation, but that the totality of nature is itself divine.

4 min read

Materialism is the metaphysical doctrine that everything that exists is physical — that matter and energy, interacting according to natural laws, constitute the whole of reality, and that mind, consciousness, and apparently non-physical phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena under other descriptions.

4 min read

Freethought is the practice of forming beliefs about religion, ethics, and metaphysics on the basis of reason and evidence rather than tradition, authority, or revelation.

3 min read

Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all genuine knowledge of the world derives from sensory experience, and that the mind brings no innate content to experience that can serve as a foundation for substantive knowledge.

4 min read

Determinism is the metaphysical doctrine that every event, including every human thought and action, is the inevitable consequence of prior events and the laws of nature — that given the state of the universe at any moment, only one future is possible.

4 min read

Deism is the belief that a creator God can be known through reason and observation of the natural world, but that this God does not intervene in human affairs, has not revealed himself through scripture, and is not available for prayer or worship.

3 min read

Atheism is the absence of belief in gods, or the positive assertion that no gods exist — a position that can be arrived at through reasoning about evidence, through philosophical argument, or simply through finding no compelling reason to believe.

4 min read

Agnosticism is the position that the existence of God, gods, or the supernatural is unknown and perhaps unknowable — that the evidence available to human beings is insufficient to justify either theistic belief or confident atheism.

4 min read

The collection that made Russell the most famous atheist of the 20th century — essays combining rigorous argument with elegant wit.

3 min read

Durant's warm, biographical approach to the history of philosophy — less rigorous than Russell but more humane, and still the most readable introduction to the great thinkers.

3 min read

Russell's brilliant, opinionated, and frequently wrong survey of Western philosophy — the best single-volume introduction ever written for the intelligent non-specialist.

3 min read

The most commercially successful atheist argument of the 21st century — polemical, exhilarating, and often philosophically underdeveloped.

3 min read

A philosopher takes issue — respectfully — with our characterization of performed uncertainty.

By Jon Ajinga 2 min read