What is Everything?

Democritus: What is everything?

Socrates: Everything is a thing. Nothing is also a thing.

Democritus: Why is everything a thing?

Socrates: Everything is a thing and are things.

First, let’s tackle how everything is a thing, i.e. how everything is one single thing. Everything contains many things, in fact every single thing. What makes everything one thing is that it is a concept that covers, that encompasses, that is used to conceive of all things, including the concept itself.

This means that everything is a thing, including (the concept of) everything.

Democritus: But isn’t the word ‘thing’ used only to refer to material things?

Socrates: Things can be material things or immaterial things.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin

“Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party,”[1] reads the first sentence of Stalin’s text, which explains the importance of his book, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Originally published in 1938, it was a section of a chapter in a larger book entitled History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/]

In the year of publication, Stalin was the secretary-general of the Communist Party and already he had amassed a lot of power. He will become the premier of the Soviet Union three years later. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he exercised dictatorial rule over the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century. Among his achievements is his industrialisation of the Soviet Union, bringing it from peasant nation to the country with the 2nd highest industrial output only behind the US. During his rule, the USSR also defeated the Nazis during the second world war, and he led the Soviet Union into the nuclear age. However, he did all these through a paranoid reign of terror that led to the deaths of tens of millions including the most powerful members of the elite closest to him. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Stalin]

Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

What is science? A common understanding of what differentiates science from other disciplines and pseudoscience is the scientific method. What then is this method? Philosophers of science have attempted to answer this question, and to understand what led Paul Feyerabend to his conclusions in his book Against Method, we need to understand the book in its context of prior theories put forward to answer these questions. To do this, we need a brief excursion through the history of the philosophy of science up to the time of the book’s publication in 1975.

Socrates’s Last Days

Credit: Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user: Sting

I want to tell you a great story of heroism, bravery and tragedy. It is the story of Socrates’s last days, which took place about 2,300 years ago and remains an important touchstone for the history of philosophy today.

An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant is an 18th century philosopher, belonging to the era of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an intellectual epoch where reason triumphed over faith. Kant is arguably one of the greatest intellectuals of all time, and his Critique of Pure Reason is considered his magnum opus. It was published when he was 57, so he had a whole lifetime to meditate upon the nature of reason. So don’t expect the book to be an easy read. It is precisely for this reason that an introduction to it can be helpful, to understand what his project is about and its broad strokes.

Kant wrote Critique to enquire into the nature of reason, laying the path for that by first examining how we perceive and understand things.