Why “Balance” Is the Most Misunderstood Word in Confucian Philosophy
Ask someone to describe the Confucian idea of zhongyong (中庸), often translated as the Doctrine of the Mean, and you will usually get some version of the same…
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What Plato’s Theory of Forms Actually Claims About Reality
Picture two things: a circle drawn quickly in the sand with a stick, and the perfect geometric circle you learned about in a math class, the one where…
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How Socrates Taught Athens to Question Everything It Knew
Imagine stopping a respected general in the middle of the Athenian agora and asking him to define courage. Not to insult him, not to test him for a…
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Why Schopenhauer Believed Life Was Fundamentally Suffering
A Philosopher Who Refused to Comfort His Readers In the early nineteenth century, German philosophy was dominated by a confident belief that history was moving somewhere meaningful. Hegel…
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Why Stoicism Is Making a Comeback
A Roman emperor once jotted down private reminders to himself about anger, mortality, and the discipline of judgment—never intending anyone else to read them. Nearly two thousand years…
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Why Nietzsche Declared That God Was Dead
In 1882, a philosopher many considered a philologist with strange enthusiasms wrote a short parable about a madman who runs into a marketplace carrying a lantern in broad…
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What Does It Mean to Live a Good Life?
A patient given six months to live rarely says she wishes she had spent more hours at the office. She rarely says she wishes she had bought a…
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How Philosophy Changes the Way We Actually Live
A woman in her forties loses her job after twenty years at the same company. Her first reaction is panic, then shame, then a question she has never…
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Why Did Hannah Arendt Speak of the Banality of Evil?
In April 1961, a glass booth stood in a Jerusalem courtroom. Inside it sat a balding, unremarkable man named Adolf Eichmann, the former SS officer who had organized…
