The “Human Nature” Debate

Understanding human nature is one of the main aims of scientific areas like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, while the consequences of their ideas is felt in politics, laws, government actions, and even in medicine.

These are the kind of questions the ideas around “human nature” may help answer:

• How should the state expect people to behave?
• For how long will humanity need punishments and prisons? Forever? Why? What can governments do about it?
• Who should be called “crazy”?

In case you want to help solve, or fully understand, some of these questions, I suggest you dive into philosophy (study…

My daughter is growing up quickly, she is 12 years old now, and as a consequence, I have to deal with many kinds of questions on a daily basis. One day she came to me asking, “why do we pay too many taxes?” Of course, this is no easy question, but this is basically what I answered her:

There are many sorts of taxes like administrative taxes, sanctions, income tax, and etc. But what drives society to create so many kinds of taxes are only two things:

(1) someone is working for you (and that person must be paid, as…

SCIENCE FICTION

The year is 2394, and anyone and everyone, civilians included, can have a spaceship. You can either apply for one, and the government gives one to you, or you can build yourself one, but either way, the government has to check your spaceship before it is launched into space. When I graduated as a space cadet, I got mine to help other people colonize the solar system. I like what I do, yet, I left Earth in a very blue state of mind…

Memories

Some people believe we don’t inherit the problems of our parents. These people are lucky. …

Rousseau did not write the famous phrase, “we are good by nature and corrupted by society.” However, he did famously pen:

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” — (The Social Contract, 1762.)

But he was mocked by Voltaire, who replied to him:

“to read your book makes one long to go about all fours.” — (On the Advantages of Civilization and Literature, 1755.)

Rousseau, then, became seen as a plain “primitivist,” i.e., someone that decries modernity, or technological progress, and believes salvation lays in an archaic past.

Who Was Rousseau?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Swiss-born musician, philosopher, and…

Achilles vs. The Turtle

Zeno and Newton give different descriptions on what happens in a race where a fast man (e.g., Achilles) runs against a turtle. This is how Zeno describes it:

“Achilles runs a race with a tortoise, who has a start of n meters. Suppose the tortoise runs one-tenth as fast as Achilles. Then by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise is n/10 meters ahead. By the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise is n/100 meters ahead, and so on ad infinitum. So Achilles cannot catch the tortoise.” …

I’m a philosophy teacher, and from time to time, I have to deal with students that despise most of what they see in and study about philosophy.

I reach out to these students by showing them there is a way they can hate philosophy more professionally. I introduce them to four great philosophers that spoke against philosophy in a very broad sense—and then I recommend a few books about each one of such philosophers.

Another good thing about this lesson is that it seems to amuse another kind of student (the kind that doesn’t hate philosophy). …

The continuum problem could be described in different ways (either in arithmetics, geometry, physics, or philosophically). Here, we will see it appearing in one of Euclid’s fundamental propositions, and then in one of Zeno’s paradoxes of movement. At the end of each of those expositions, a few questions will be raised, and, in the next sections, we will see how Aristotle and Democritus dealt with these questions.

Euclid