Philosophy
Essays and references on how people have tried to make sense of things.
References
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Website) — the gold-standard free philosophy reference — thousands of scholar-written, peer-reviewed, continuously updated entries.
- Japanese Aesthetics (Article) — a tour through six core ideas (mono no aware, wabi, sabi, yūgen, iki, and kire) and how a culture built beauty out of impermanence and imperfection.
Articles
- Who do you think you are? There are two answers (Article) — philosopher Joanna Lawson splits identity in two: the metaphysical self that society grants you when you meet its success conditions, and the existential self you avow from the inside — and argues that being seen as both is a gift.
Watching
- Why wanting it too badly ruins everything (Video) — eight minutes from Verse Creates on desire and detachment: how gripping an outcome too tightly is often the thing that costs you it. The line viewers keep quoting back at it is “when you expect nothing, everything becomes a gift.”
Blogs
- Philosophy Bits (Website) — a long-running Tumblr posting one sourced quote at a time, from Merleau-Ponty on solitude and Kierkegaard on faith to Schopenhauer on whether a life reads as tragedy or comedy depending on how closely you look.
- Philosophical Disquisitions (Website) — John Danaher on the ethics of technology — AI, autonomy, digital duplicates of people — argued in careful, diagrammed detail.