Philosophical Dictionary

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.

The philosopher meme puts the same caption on two men in Raphael’s School of Athens, one writing, the other copying. Whitehead called European philosophy footnotes to Plato, Aristotle broke with his teacher, and a well-known 2015 paper asked why there is not more progress. So is philosophy going in circles?

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?

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?

The philosophy meme is blunt: open Kant or Hegel with no background and the book bites. Kant knew readers found the Critique dry and obscure, and Hume disowned his first book as juvenile work. So should beginners start with primary texts or secondary literature, and which books should a beginner read first?