Philosophical Dictionary

A viral line says crushing a cockroach makes you a hero and crushing a butterfly a villain. Nobody can trace it to Rumi, but the question is ancient: the Greeks fused beautiful and good into kalokagathia, Kant made beauty a symbol of morality, and psychologists tested the bias. Do our morals follow our eyes?

In 1990 Gilles Deleuze wrote five pages arguing that Foucault’s disciplinary society was already ending. Prisons and factories were giving way to codes, access cards, endless training and debt. What did he mean by dividuals, why does the panopticon meme get Foucault backwards, and was Deleuze right?

Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the solace of his life and put them next to Kant and Plato. He read them in Latin, via Persian, and built an ethics of renunciation that sounds a lot like moksha. Did he borrow his philosophy from India, and why does the meme about sex and the will to live get him right?

Philosophy means love of wisdom, and Plato’s Socrates called himself barren of it. Aristotle traced it to wonder, Russell put its value in uncertainty, and David Chalmers asked in 2015 why it makes so little progress. Thales used it to corner the olive market. So what is philosophy for, if it never settles anything?

“It’s not hoarding if it’s books” sounds like an excuse printed on a tote bag. Yet Japanese has had a word for the unread pile since the 1870s, Umberto Eco’s library became the model for Taleb’s antilibrary, and a study of 160,000 adults found that books at home matter. So what would Seneca say about your shelves?

Wittgenstein’s line about the limits of language usually gets quoted as advice to learn more words. The original says something stranger: logic, the world and the self share one boundary, and the most important things lie beyond it. Where does the quote come from, and did Wittgenstein later take it back?