Philosophical Dictionary

The last post in our Presocratics series, let's take a look at the oneness of poet and philosopher Parmenides of Elea, examining his ideas on human knowledge and how the universe works.

Prisoners chained in a cave take shadows for reality. One gets out, sees the sun, and comes back to tell the others, who laugh at him and would kill him if they could. Here is a simple summary of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, what every symbol means, how it connects to the theory of Forms, the sun and the divided line, why it ends with a threat of murder, and why it still describes our screens today.

Discover Descartes' method of doubt: the radical skepticism that challenged dogmatism and changed philosophy forever. Learn how questioning everything led to "I think, therefore I am" and why this 17th-century method remains essential for critical thinking in our age of misinformation and fake news.

We discuss Thomas Nagel's ideas on the limitations of human knowledge and how much we can know about subjectivity of experience outside our own. Can we know what it is like to be a bat?

Explore the Münchhausen trilemma, the fascinating philosophical puzzle that shows why all knowledge faces three unsatisfying options: infinite regress, circular reasoning, or unprovable assumptions. Learn why absolute certainty is elusive and how to think more clearly anyway.

Edmund Gettier published two papers and one review in his career, and one three-page paper showed that a justified true belief can still miss knowledge. Sixty years later the problem has a new setting: feeds sorted for each of us. Does the filter bubble make lucky truths the norm, and what does the research say?