Philosophical Dictionary

A pumpkin carved with “inferring causation from correlation” is a statistician’s idea of horror. David Hume argued we do not even see causes, only one thing following another. Yet Doll and Hill linked smoking to lung cancer without an experiment. So how does science get from correlation to causation at all?

It is the most famous formula in philosophy class, and Hegel never used it for his own method. We trace thesis, antithesis, synthesis back to Kant, Fichte and a forgotten popularizer, then show how Hegel’s dialectic actually works, from being and nothing to freedom and love. So why does the wrong version stick?

“Death is the most certain possibility” travels as a Heidegger quote on a cigarette pack. Being and Time puts it differently, and the difference matters: what it means to live towards your own death, why everyday talk of “one dies” hides it, and why Sartre and Camus refused to follow. Who had the better answer?

Kierkegaard is famous for the leap of faith and for saying truth is subjectivity. One phrase never appears in his published works, and the other belongs to a pseudonym who writes about Christian faith without claiming it. What did Kierkegaard mean by faith, and why does the knight of faith look like a tax collector?

A meme claims absurdists are nihilists who fell for their captor. Nietzsche’s notebooks split nihilism into a weary kind and a destructive kind, Camus warned that the absurd can make murder look indifferent, and Stockholm syndrome itself is a contested label. Is the joke unfair, or does it land a real hit?

Epicurus told his students that death is nothing to us: while we exist, death is not here, and when it comes, we are gone. Lucretius added a mirror argument, Thomas Nagel objected, and Epicurus faced his own death with a letter about a happy day. Does the argument hold, and what did he mean by pleasure?