The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed that God was the ultimate cause of existence, that God created the world from nothing.
What is the problem of evil? The fact that there is evil, that bad things happen, is undeniable. But this doesn’t constitute a single problem; rather it presents a host of problems, and in some cases, although not always, solutions.
When Adam and Eve disobeyed the divine prohibition and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they couldn’t have known that they were doing anything evil, for, until then, they didn’t possess such knowledge.
It is impossible to reach an understanding of the meaning of life without a knowledge of good and evil, for lacking it we would not be able to decide how to act, what goals to pursue, how to direct the course of our lives.
There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving one of his life purposes. He has become a world-historical figure.
Plato was not only a profound philosopher, but also a consummate artist, and reading his works is not only interesting and intellectually challenging, but an aesthetic delight.
Socrates imagined that death is one of two things: Either it is extinction, or the release of the soul from the body and its migration to another place.
It is a curious fact that the two greatest moral teachers of the Western intellectual tradition — Socrates of Athens (470–399 BCE) and Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–30 CE) — wrote nothing.
In my last essay I wrote that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who was surely a great philosopher, believed that God is the reason for everything, which leads to another question: Is there a reason for God?
“Why is there anything at all? Why not Nothing?” The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) took this to be the fundamental question of philosophy.
What is the meaning of life? I will consider answers to this question in a new series of essays.
If you’re lucky, you’ll spot Victor and Betty Nuovo just about any morning, walking hand-in-hand along Main and/or Weybridge streets.
Political Realism is a theory of government whose special concern is with the immoral forces endemic to all governments, which are stubborn and persistent obstacles to justice.
This essay concludes my current series of essays, and, as is fitting, I finish with a conclusion.
I will conclude this series of essays on the life of the mind in America with a brief account of “A Theory of Justice” by American philosopher John Rawls.
