A Fool's Errand by Matthew D'Antuono

Plato's works are very readable. Since he was the father of philosophy, there was no technical vocabulary at the time. He wrote in the form of dialogues, so the prose is less dry than mere treatises. Aristotle is a little more difficult, but he is still very systematic and clear as long as you can pay attention. Mortimer Adler is one of the clearest and most common-sensical writers

Beauty is the splendor of truth. If we find something that is truly beautiful, then we know that we have found something true. Most of the time, new scientific theories meet with great resistance within the scientific community; it takes a long time for scientists to be convinced of new ideas. But in the case of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, almost all scientists belie

Ethics is about the good life. The study of happiness and virtue helps us understand how we ought to spend our time and live life to the fullest. This topic provides us with an answer to the age-old question about the meaning of life. What most people mean when they ask about the meaning of life is, “What is my purpose?” The answer is to reach your fullest potential. Matthew Ke

Happiness is one of the words that we use without giving a clear definition. So it is really easy to equivocate with that word (use the word in more than one sense). The types of happiness discussed in the first paragraph are types of happiness, but Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and many other wise people discuss a different type of happiness. You might be won

Due to man’s body-soul unity, we do not begin our lives knowing anything at all, but we are born with innate abilities. As we interact with the world, real objects impress themselves on our senses, and an image is formed in the intellect of those objects. Our intellect is then able to abstract the essences of things and their properties. For example, when I see a table, my senses

The vast majority of people would find it horrifying to never be able to interact with people ever again. It seems that we were built for each other. As Aristotle said, man is a social animal by nature. It is part of the essence of man to live with other people and for men to organize themselves into societies. It is through this type of observation and reasoning that we can figure

Picture in your mind the cave. People are lined up in rows, all facing forward. Above and behind them there is a light that produces an image on a large wall in front of them. What does this sound like? A movie theater? And how often are we convinced that the world in the movies is real life and that our own lives are just a boring copy of the movie world? That the fame, violence,

I was once asked what my favorite topic in philosophy is. It took me a second to think through the various topics, but as soon as I thought of it, I knew it: God. This was a surprising answer to the person who asked the question, because God is always thought of as a strictly religious entity. But philosophy can also give us a lot of information about God, and no subject is more be

The basic and most fundamental law of logic: the law of non-contradiction, which states that a thing cannot be and not be in the same way and at the same time. After all, I could look at a piece of paper folded like a chair and say, “That chair is not a chair,” but what I really mean is that the piece of paper shaped like a chair is not a chair that you can sit in. The sentence

This study of the nature of existence is called Metaphysics. It is the most foundational topic in philosophy because anything else that we can talk about is something that exists, and it is sometimes called “first philosophy.” Metaphysics gets its name because the book that Aristotle wrote on this topic came after his book about physics. Meta- in Greek means after. So, this boo