Philosophy

Socrates (469–399 BCE) did not write a single line. Everything we know about him has come down to us through Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes—each of whom depicted him differently. The paradox of Socrates is that this most influential philosopher of the West operated exclusively through conversa...

This is not a pose of humility, but an epistemological position with far-reaching consequences. If a person does not realize the limits of their knowledge, they make decisions with false confidence. The politician is convinced that he knows what justice is—but upon examination, it turns out he ca...

Socrates compared his philosophical method to his mother's profession as a midwife: he does not give birth to thoughts himself—he helps the interlocutor to “give birth” to what he already carries inside himself. This is maieutics—spiritual midwifery.

In practice, the method looked like this: Socrates would start with a simple question (“What is courage?”, “What is piety?”, “What is knowledge?”). The interlocutor would give an answer that seemed obvious to him. Socrates, through a series of clarifying questions—elenchus (refutation, testing)—w...

Plato (428–348 BC) divided reality into two levels. The first is the world of sensory things: changeable, temporary, accessible through the senses. The horse we see grows old, gets sick, and dies. The second is the world of ideas (eidos): eternal, unchanging, comprehensible only by reason. The Id...

Where does this idea come from? Plato drew inspiration from mathematics. We have never seen a perfect circle—any drawn circle is imperfect. But the idea of a circle exists, and we understand it. Mathematical truths do not depend on experience: they are grasped directly by reason. Plato extended t...

The highest idea is the Good (agathon). In the "Republic," Plato compares it to the Sun: as the Sun makes things visible to the eyes, so the Good makes ideas comprehensible to the mind. Everything else is a shadow of the Good.

In Book VII of the "Republic," Plato describes people chained in a cave with their backs to the exit. Behind them burns a fire; in front of them is a wall onto which the shadows of objects, carried between them and the fire, fall. The prisoners take the shadows for reality—that is all they have e...

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great. If Plato was the poet of philosophy, a thinker of daring images and utopias, then Aristotle was its scientist, systematizer, and empiricist. He was the first to create a classification system of knowledge: logi...

Aristotle fundamentally disagreed with Plato on the main point: ideas do not exist separately from things. The form of a horse is not located somewhere in a transcendent world of ideas—it is realized in each concrete horse. An individual thing is a unity of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Form g...

Aristotle created formal logic—the science of correct reasoning. His principal instrument was the syllogism: a form of inference in which a conclusion follows from two premises.

A classic example: all men are mortal (major premise); Socrates is a man (minor premise); therefore, Socrates is mortal (conclusion). If the premises are true and the form is correct, the conclusion is inevitable.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, thinkers were faced with a question: what should be done with Greek philosophy? Reject it as pagan? Accept it completely? Synthesize it? This very question—how faith and reason, revelation and rational knowledge relate to one ano...

Two thinkers gave two fundamentally different answers. Augustine of Hippo (354–430)—an African bishop, former Manichean and Platonist, who converted to Christianity at the age of 33. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)—an Italian Dominican monk who systematized Christian theology based on Aristotle.

Augustine’s “Confessions” is the first introspective autobiography in Western literature. Its opening phrase sets the tone for all of his philosophy: “You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” A human being is a creature originally directed toward God. Adam’...

Epistemologically, Augustine is a Platonist: true knowledge is attained not through the senses, but through inner illumination. God enlightens the mind just as the sun illuminates objects. Without this illuminatio, the mind wanders in darkness. Hence: faith precedes understanding. Credo ut intell...

One of the most famous debates of medieval philosophy is the debate about universals: do general concepts (such as “humanity”, “beauty”, “justice”) exist in reality, or only as words? Realists (Anselm, Thomas Aquinas) claimed: yes, general concepts exist really. Nominalists (Roscelin, William of ...

This debate is not just a verbal game. It has theological consequences: if “humanity” is real, it is easier to speak about the natures of Christ and the unity of the Trinity. If not, theology becomes significantly more complex. It has political consequences: if “state” or “church” are real as uni...

William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347) is the most important nominalist. His “Ockham’s razor”: “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” This is a principle of intellectual economy, still used in science: if a phenomenon can be explained by simpler means, there is no need to introduce complexity. O...

Alongside scholasticism in the Middle Ages exists another tradition—mysticism: direct, immediate experience of God, bypassing rational proofs. Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), a German Dominican, taught that in the depths of the soul there is a “spark” (Funklein)—a point where a person encounters God...

1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. 1492: Columbus discovers the New World. 1543: Copernicus publishes the heliocentric system. In one century, everything that seemed unshakable collapses: the unity of the Church, the center of the universe, the bounda...

Two thinkers especially illustrate this transition well: Erasmus of Rotterdam and Niccolò Machiavelli. Both are children of the Renaissance. Both are critics. But their criticism is aimed in completely different directions: Erasmus criticizes moral degeneration while maintaining faith in reason a...

“The Praise of Folly” (1509) is one of the greatest satirical texts in history. Erasmus (1466–1536) writes a speech in the name of Folly (Moria), who praises herself: for she alone rules the world! Who are the most foolish of all? Monarchs, popes, theologians, monks, merchants—all carry their sha...

But the text is ambiguous. By the end, the “folly” of Christianity turns out wiser than worldly wisdom: the wisdom of the Cross is madness for reason, but the highest truth for the believer. Erasmus uses the genre of satire to say what cannot be said openly—and protects himself with irony.

René Descartes (1596–1650) decided to start from a blank slate. Like an architect who discovers that the foundation of a house is rotten, he chose to demolish the entire building of knowledge and rebuild it—from a solid base. His method of doubt: can one doubt this? If yes—we discard it. Our sens...

“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum). If I doubt—I think. If I think—I exist. This cannot be disputed: doubting itself requires someone who doubts. This is the Archimedean point—the only firm support from which the entire structure of knowledge can be rebuilt.

Descartes is a dualist: the world consists of two substances. Res cogitans is the thinking substance, soul, mind. Res extensa is the extended substance, matter, body. They are fundamentally different: the soul is unextended and indivisible, the body is extended and divisible. How do they interact...

Descartes was not only a philosopher but also a mathematician (analytic geometry, the Cartesian coordinate system) and physicist. His “Discourse on the Method” (1637) is a manifesto of a new approach to knowledge: break a problem into parts, begin with the simplest, proceed to the more complex, m...

David Hume (1711–1776) is the most consistent and destructive philosopher of the Enlightenment. He took Locke’s empiricism seriously and arrived at conclusions that shook the entire system.

What is causality? We see a ball strike another ball and the second one rolls. We think: the first ball is the cause of the second’s movement. But what do we actually observe? Contiguity in space. Succession in time. Constant conjunction (it has always happened this way). Nothing more. We do not ...

Consequence: the problem of induction. From the fact that the sun has risen a million times, it does not necessarily follow that it will rise tomorrow. Induction is a logically unjustified leap. We act on the basis of habit and belief, not rational justification.

Hume also attacks the idea of a substantial “self.” We think there is an unchanging “I” that undergoes experience. But in self-observation we find only a stream of impressions and ideas—not a single stable “I.” A “bundle of perceptions”—that is what “I” is.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) spent his entire life in Königsberg, venturing outside its limits only for a few miles. He lectured precisely by schedule, took walks at the same time daily—city residents set their clocks by him. But at 57 years old, the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) overturned Weste...

He called Hume his teacher, who "awakened him from dogmatic slumber." Hume showed that neither empiricism (Locke) nor rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz) can substantiate our knowledge about the world. Kant set himself the task: to find a third way.

Before Copernicus, people thought: the Sun revolved around the Earth. Copernicus reversed this: the Earth revolves around the Sun. Kant applied this revolution to the theory of knowledge. Before him, people thought: knowledge is formed by the object, which acts upon a passive mind. Kant reversed:...

Kant calls these forms a priori (preceding experience): space, time, causality, substance. We do not extract them from experience—we bring them to experience. We see the world structured through these categories because that is how our mind works. But what the world is "in itself", independent of...

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pronounces this not as an atheist slogan, but as a diagnosis of a cultural crisis. In "The Gay Science" (1882), the "madman" runs with a lantern in broad daylight: "I am looking for God!" Passersby laugh—they have not believed for a long time. "God is dead. God rem...

This is not triumph, but tragedy. European culture killed God through science, historical criticism of the Bible, materialism—but has not yet realized the consequences. Nihilism—the belief that nothing has meaning—became the inevitable result.

But Nietzsche is not a nihilist; he diagnoses nihilism in order to overcome it. His project: the revaluation of all values. Current "Christian" values—humility, pity, equality—he calls slave morality. The slave cannot conquer—so he declares strength evil, and weakness a virtue. This is ressentime...

In contrast—master morality: affirmation, creation of values, will to power. Will to power is not political power over people, but an inner impulse toward self-overcoming, growth, creativity. Life as will to power.

Definitions

Authenticity vs inauthenticity

— Most people live in the mode of "das Man"—"they," "everyone": doing what everyone does, saying what everyone says. This is an escape from responsibility for one's own existence. Authenticity means taking responsibility for one’s "thrown" existence...

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) founded phenomenology—a philosophical method that requires describing experience as it appears to consciousness, prior to any theoretical assumptions. The slogan: "Back to the things themselves" (Zu den Sachen selbst).

Method: epoché (phenomenological reduction)—to "bracket" the natural attitude (the belief in the existence of the external world) and study pure consciousness and how objects are constituted in it. Consciousness is always intentional—it is always directed at something: I see a tree, think about m...

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is the most influential philosopher of the 20th century (and the most difficult). "Being and Time" (1927) poses the question that, in his view, Western philosophy since Plato has missed: what does it mean to be?

His key concept is Dasein ("being-there," human existence). Dasein is always already "thrown" into the world—into a particular historical, cultural, linguistic situation, which it did not choose. Dasein is always already with others. And Dasein is always being-toward-death: the awareness of finit...

Definitions

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) — a history of ideas as a history of power. His method is genealogy

— to show that what seems natural to us (madness, sexuality, punishment) is historically constructed by particular regimes of power/knowledge. “Discipline and Punish” (1975): the modern prison is not progress over public executions, but another tech...

At the beginning of the 20th century in Cambridge, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore rebelled against German idealism (Hegel). Their program: philosophy must be clear, logically rigorous, close to science. The source of errors is language, which conceals the real logical structure.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) — two periods, two different philosophers. The early Wittgenstein (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, 1921): the world is a set of facts; a proposition is a logical image of a fact; about what cannot be said, one must remain silent. The later Wittgenstein (“Philosop...

“The meaning of a word is its use in language.” Philosophical problems are “diseases of language”: we take a word from one language game and apply it in another — and create pseudo-problems. The therapy of philosophy is to untangle these knots.

Karl Popper (1902–1994) — philosophy of science. The demarcation criterion: a scientific theory must be falsifiable — it must imply observations that could refute it. Darwin’s theory is scientific (it is possible to find fossils that would refute it). Freud, Marx — not entirely (any phenomenon ca...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) writes poorly, is difficult to read, and yet is arguably the most influential thinker of the 19th–20th centuries. Without Hegel, there is no Marx, no Kierkegaard, no existentialism, and no large part of left and right political thought of the 20th century...

Hegel offers a grand project: to explain everything—nature, history, thought, law, religion, art—as stages in the unfolding of a single Absolute Spirit. Reality is not static: it moves, develops, and this movement follows a dialectical rhythm.

The famous formula “thesis—antithesis—synthesis” does not strictly belong to Hegel himself, but it precisely captures his method. Any concept, any historical phenomenon generates its own contradiction—and this contradiction is not an error, but the engine of development. The contradiction is subl...

Example: the slave and the master. In the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” Hegel describes the struggle of two self-consciousnesses. The master risks his life for recognition—and receives it. But he becomes dependent on the slave. The slave, working with material, invests himself in it and attains self...

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is the most influential thinker who was never regarded merely as a philosopher. Economist, historian, sociologist, revolutionary publicist—he took Hegel’s dialectic, “stood it on its head,” and created a system of societal analysis that shaped twentieth-century politics. His...

Marx began as a Young Hegelian, captivated by Hegel’s ideas. But encountering the real poverty of workers in the Rhineland changed his direction: philosophy must not only explain the world, but also change it. The famous thesis: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the p...

Whereas for Hegel the Spirit is the driving force of history, for Marx it is the material conditions of production. The base (economic relations, mode of production) determines the superstructure (politics, law, religion, philosophy). Consciousness does not determine being—being determines consci...

History moves through the succession of modes of production: primitive communism → slavery → feudalism → capitalism → communism. Each stage is defined by the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production. When new productive forces (technologies, labor organization) come int...

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the most read and most dangerously misunderstood philosopher. The Nazis used his ideas; feminists reinterpreted him; Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida inherited him. His texts are aphoristic, provocative, often contradictory. He wrote not treatises, but poems of th...

Nietzsche is a diagnostician of cultural crisis. His main diagnosis: European culture is dying because it has lost the values on which it was grounded, and has not found new ones. “God is dead” is not a theological judgement, but a cultural statement. Christianity and metaphysics, which guarantee...

Nihilism for Nietzsche is not a position someone chooses, but a symptom of the era. When absolutes (God, Reason, Nature) collapse, everything appears meaningless. Passive nihilism is depression, exhaustion, the will to non-being (Nietzsche saw this in Buddhism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism). Activ...

Nietzsche proposes a “revaluation of all values.” Morality is not divinely revealed and not “natural”—it is historically constructed. In “Genealogy of Morality” he shows: Christian morality is “slave morality,” a product of ressentiment (the resentment of the weak towards the strong), which turne...

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) began as a mathematician and came to philosophy through the question: how is mathematical knowledge possible? What happens in consciousness when we “see” the truth of a theorem? This question led him to develop phenomenology—a program for the investigation of consciousn...

Toward the end of his life, Husserl wrote “The Crisis of European Sciences” (1936): positive science has forgotten the “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt)—the world of everyday experience from which it grew. Sciences explain the world objectively, but lose connection with subjective meaning—that is, with wh...

The key phenomenological principle—borrowed from Brentano—is that consciousness is intentional. This means that consciousness is always “about something”—it is always directed toward an object. There is no “pure” consciousness in a vacuum: there is perception of a chair, memory of summer, fear be...

This may seem trivial, but it entails radical consequences. The question “what is this object?” must be replaced with “how is this object given to consciousness?”—how it appears (phainesthai). Hence the name: phenomenology—the science of phenomena, of the appearances of consciousness.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) posed a question that, in his view, philosophy had forgotten: what does it mean to be? Not “what are things?”, but “what does it mean that they exist?” This may seem abstract, but it conceals a real problem: the modern world treats people as things, as resources, as “...

“Being and Time” (1927) is the main work of Heidegger’s early period. Its goal: through an analysis of human existence (Dasein—“being-there”, literally “here-being”) to approach the question of being in general.

First and most important: the human being is not “a consciousness in a body in a world”, but is originally being-in-the-world. The world is not an external environment into which consciousness “falls”—the world is the horizon in which I am already always situated. I understand a hammer not theore...

When the hammer is broken, it falls out of this practical embeddedness and becomes “present-at-hand” (vorhanden)—an object of theoretical observation. Heidegger shows: science is a secondary, derivative way of relating to the world. What is primary is the practical grasp of the world through acti...

The end of World War II. Concentration camps, the atomic bomb, the collaboration of millions and the heroism of a few. Existentialism—primarily French—responded to the question: how to live when traditional moral guidelines have failed? If God was silent during Auschwitz, if rational people serve...

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus gave different but related answers. Their works of the 1940s were read and discussed in Parisian cafés and underground circles as living philosophy, not academic texts.

Sartre’s main thesis: “Existence precedes essence.” For things, essence (definition) comes first, then existence: a knife is made for cutting—its essence is determined by the craftsman before its creation. For humans, the opposite is true: first a person simply exists—with no given nature, no pre...

This is radical freedom: “Man is condemned to be free.” You cannot say “that’s my nature,” “I was raised this way,” “I have no choice”—these are all examples of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi). Every moment is a choice, even not to choose—that’s also a choice.

At the end of the 19th century, the German mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) created what became analytic philosophy—not intentionally, but in the search for the foundations of arithmetic. His question: what is the number “2”? Not “what is 2+2”—but what does “two” actually mean. It was nece...

Frege invented modern symbolic logic—a language in which logical relations can be written with mathematical rigor. His “Begriffsschrift” (Concept Script, 1879) was a turning point: for the first time, logic received a notation comparable in precision to algebraic notation.

Frege made a fundamental distinction that became the basis of semantics. “The morning star” and “the evening star” are the same celestial body (Venus). They have the same referent (Bedeutung—what they refer to). But they differ in sense (Sinn—the mode of presentation). “The morning star = the eve...

This distinction has enormous consequences. It explains why “2+2=4” and “the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the legs” are both true, but the first is trivial, while the second is a discovery. It also explains why statements about non-existent objects (“the present king ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is an exceptional case in the history of philosophy: he refuted himself and created an entirely different philosophy. The "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (1921) and the "Philosophical Investigations" (published posthumously, 1953) present two different, almost opp...

Wittgenstein was an engineer, served in the Austrian army during World War I, and worked as a gardener and elementary school teacher between his two philosophical periods. His life was as contradictory as his works.

Early Wittgenstein constructs a system: the world consists of facts (not things). Facts are atomic: they are combinations of objects in specific configurations. Propositions of language picture facts: each meaningful proposition is a logical image of a particular state of affairs in the world.

Consequence: only propositions about facts can be meaningful—that is, propositions of empirical science. Ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics are not false, but "meaningless" in the strict sense: they attempt to say what can only be shown.

The second half of the 20th century in analytic philosophy is a gradual rejection of foundationalism: the idea that knowledge has unshakable foundations (whether sensory data or logical truths). Three figures—Willard Quine, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty—represent this turn toward naturalism ...

Willard Quine (1908–2000), in the article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), attacked two main convictions of logical positivism. The first dogma: the distinction between analytic (true by meaning of words) and synthetic (empirical) statements. Quine demonstrates that it is impossible to draw thi...

The second dogma: "reductionism"—every meaningful statement can be translated into statements about sensory experience. Quine rejects this as well: statements of science confront experience not one at a time, but "en masse," as an entire system. If experience contradicts theory, we can adjust any...

Quine's metaphor: knowledge is a "field of force," not a set of atomic statements. The periphery of the field is closer to experience, the center is the most fundamental beliefs (logical and mathematical). When experience contradicts the system, we make minimal changes. But in principle, even log...

Definitions

Dualism

— consciousness and matter are two different things. Descartes is the first modern dualist. Chalmers is a “naturalistic dualist”: consciousness is real and irreducible, but somehow connected to the physical world. This is the least popular position ...

Panpsychism

— consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, like mass or charge. This does not mean that stones “think”: they have micro-experience, and complex systems integrate it into macro-consciousness. This position is defended by Galen Strawson and ...

In 1995, Australian philosopher David Chalmers introduced the concept of the "hard problem of consciousness". The easy problems—how the brain processes information, integrates perception, controls behavior—are, in principle, solvable through neuroscience and cognitive science. The hard problem is...

When you see the color red, certain processes occur in the brain and certain neurons are activated. This can be described neurobiologically. But why, during these processes, is there something it is like to see red? Why are there “qualia”—the qualitative characteristics of experience? Chalmers' z...

There are three main positions in the discussion about consciousness. Materialism (physicalism): consciousness is a physical process. "Qualia" are an illusion or a misdescription; neuroscience, in principle, will explain everything. Dennett is the main defender: "Consciousness Explained" (1991). ...

Dualism: consciousness and matter are two different things. Descartes is the first modern dualist. Chalmers is a “naturalistic dualist”: consciousness is real and irreducible, but somehow connected to the physical world. This is the least popular position among scientists, but the most honest in ...

Every technology is not just a tool: it changes relationships between people, the distribution of power, and what is considered possible and normal. Writing changed memory and authority. Printing — the information order and politics. The internet — speed, identity, privacy. Understanding these ch...

Hans Jonas, in "The Imperative of Responsibility" (1979), formulated the problem: traditional ethics was an ethics of proximity (responsibility for those nearby, here and now). Technology made actions with distant and long-term consequences possible — impact on climate, genetic modifications, nuc...

Bioethics emerged in the 1960s and 70s with the development of medicine: life support machines made death controllable, transplantation turned the body into a resource, reproductive technologies made birth planable. Four principles of Beauchamp and Childress: autonomy (the right of the patient to...

The most difficult questions: When does life end (euthanasia)? Is human genetic engineering permissible? Who owns biological data? How to distribute scarce organs for transplantation? Each question requires balancing competing values and has no ready-made answer.

Geologists have proposed a new term for our era: the Anthropocene—the “age of humans.” Human activity has become a geological force: climate change, the sixth mass extinction, plastic pollution of the oceans, the nitrogen cycle. This is not just an environmental crisis—it is a crisis of the world...

Ecological philosophy poses the question: how must we think about nature in order to deal with this crisis? Answers range from moderate (reforming capitalism) to radical (abandoning anthropocentrism altogether).

The Western tradition is anthropocentric: nature has value insofar as it serves the human. This stems from the biblical “dominion” over creatures, from Descartes’ vision of nature as a machine, from Kantian ethics with the rational subject at its center.

Ecocentrism (Aldo Leopold, Arne Næss) asserts: nature has value in and of itself, regardless of its usefulness to humans. Leopold’s “land ethic” (1949): “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ...