In Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel The Blood of Others, the narrator, Jean Blomart, reports on his childhood friend Marcel’s reaction to the word “revolution”:
It was senseless to try to change anything in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not meddle with them.

Love him or hate him, many of our readers may know enough about Daniel C. Dennett to have formed some opinion of his work. While Dennett can be a soft-spoken, jovial presence, he doesn’t suffer fuzzy thinking or banal platitudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly.

The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 90 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.

John Rawls’ 1971 book A Theory of Justice—with its famous illustration of “the veil of ignorance”—is a rigorous attempt to make egalitarian principles normative in political philosophy.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—often considered the first existentialist—was born 200 years ago this past Sunday in Copenhagen.

Andy Stewart builds boats with his own hands for life-affirming reasons. It’s a way to make inanimate objects come alive, to breathe new life into our world. But Stewart also enjoys the challenge of it all. The sea, he tells us, is the “final arbitrator” of your work.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom readers of post-structuralist theory have to thank for popularizing the ubiquitous phrase “always already,” was a very labored writer who coined much of his own terminology and gave many a translator migraines.

Who’s ready for a lesson on “Eggsalentlalism?” How about “Exatentalum?” Sound like fun? Great! Pull up a tiny chair, grab a toy, and get ready to have Nietzsche explained like you’re five with “Explain Like I’m Five: Existentialism and Friederich Nietzsche.

Non-philosophers sometimes charge philosophers with talking and writing voluminously to no particular end, getting nothing done, solving no problems. But Slavoj Žižek, clown prince of academic superstardom, has a response: “Philosophy does not solve problems,” he claims in the clip above.

Apotheosis of cyberpunk culture, 1999’s The Matrix and its less-successful sequels introduced a generation of fanboys and girls to the most stylish expression of some age-old idealist thought experiments: the Hindu concept of Maya, Plato’s cave, Descartes’ evil demon, Hilary Putnam’s Brain in a Vat—all notions about the nature of rea