Modern life is a collision of two forces: people and days, and more to the point — individuals and hours. This continual conflict has ruined many days for many people. This recurrent crisis cannot be solved but can be soothed by a clear-headed, hype-free look at the clash between people and the clock.

One of my strange hobbies is reading spam e-mails from self-proclaimed experts who claim they can make me rich by teaching me to be like them. The e-mails brag that these ”experts” in productivity and entrepreneurship are always “crushing it” because they “take total charge” over their…

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804, rhymes with “want”) is the single most influential philosopher in history, even though you have probably never heard of him. How we think of ourselves and how we think about how we perceive the world is from Kant’s philosophy. Philosophy is a long conversation. Immanuel Kant formed a significant turning point in that conversation. And Kant was inspired by Hume, who was inspired by Berkeley, who was inspired by Locke, who was inspired by Descartes, who was inspired by Augustine, who was inspired by Plotinus, who was inspired by Plato. It really was a long conversation.

There…

For centuries, it has been taught that there was a long “dark age” in European history from about 450 CE to sometime between 1250 to 1350 CE. The idea has been repeated so often that it is accepted as truth. This period is denoted by the relative lack of new scholastic material in the sciences, literature, and philosophy. Those who support the myth of a dark age blame as culprits the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity.

It is a popular myth that philosophy, if not critical thinking in general, ended sometime in the late…

The corporate media loves simplifications. It enjoys painting with a broad brush and placing everything into tidy, constricting categories. One of the media’s simplifications is to label people as belonging to a generation. They claim you are a “baby boomer,” a “millennial,” a “Gen Xer,” or so on, defining you by the classification to which they have consigned you. Thinking in terms of generations isn’t completely silly, but the current thoughtless pantheon of generations is largely meaningless.

There are no millennials, and no such thing as Gen X or Gen Y or any of the even more vacant media fictions.

…

The morning of 9/11, I slept in, having no classes to teach that Tuesday. I made coffee and a bagel, and I turned on the computer to see the headline “Attacks on Twin Towers and Pentagon Building.” The rest of the day was a blur, except the memories of watching the towers collapse and thinking that I was scheduled to teach an ethics class the next morning. The community college at which I was teaching philosophy part-time decided it would go forward with all classes the next day.

As I drove in for my 9 am class, it was surreal…

Defining Justice

Plato’s longest and most detailed dialogue was The Republic. One of Plato’s central topics in the book is the question of what Justice is. For him, justice is both an ethical issue and a political issue. Justice concerns how individuals should interact with each other and how society should be structured and ruled. In exploring the question about defining justice, Plato uses his usual literary device of Socrates discussing the question with alleged authorities. They give Socrates examples and definitions of justice; each one in turn Socrates shows to be inadequate.

The complex arguments of the back-and-forth between Socrates and…

Philosophy of Science

David Hume’s (1711–1776) philosophy was the culmination of the trajectory of British empiricism (see Chapters 8 and 11). Hume’s shocking conclusion was that the long quest for understanding had reached no true understanding at all. Descartes was not a true skeptic because he believed that knowledge is possible. Hume was a true skeptic in that he genuinely doubted that real knowledge was possible. Is scientific and philosophical knowledge possible?Yes and no, is what Hume’s philosophy tells us.

In Hume’s time, science was rebuilding the structures of knowledge, but he was disturbed by the looseness he saw in these structures. He…

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of someone being afraid of success, but I remember scoffing at the idea. How could someone feel anything but happiness about their successes? Growing up in a family in which silent misery was the thing, and because I hated that fatalism, the idea of resisting success seemed daft to me.

No longer. I am successful now, and now I know what people mean when they talk about having difficulties dealing with success.

Now, to be fair, I’m not a raging success. I’m not famous. I’m not a millionaire. I’m not beloved by…