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Questions tagged [human-condition]

62 questions
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What philosophical views are there on the problem of boredom?

"I am convinced that boredom is one of the greatest tortures. If I were to imagine Hell, it would be the place where you were continually bored" - Eric Fromm Has there been any significant philosophical studies on the issue of boredom…
AIB
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What essential properties make us human?

(Correct me if I am wrong) In ontology, essentialism is the belief that object O has property P, property P is therefore an ESSENTIAL property if there is something else which is not property P it is an ACCIDENTAL property So what are the…
user37486
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What are some philosophical arguments for accepting absurdity?

In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, what are some philosophical…
John
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Do humans have skills we haven't discovered yet?

I was thinking about the invention of writing. Before we had writing, we didn't have writing; but we had the potential to have writing. We know this because cats and caterpillars don't have writing, but humans do; yet, humans once didn't have…
user4894
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Contemporary objections to "human nature"

Motivation The sentiment that Human Rights are not universal poses legal, political, and philosophical problems. Stephen C. Angle cites the head of a Chinese delegation, Liu Huaqiu (1995), in his book Angle, S. C. (2002). Human rights in Chinese…
Philip Klöcking
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What would be the logical consequences of human will/nature being corrupt?

I'm have a question that I don't think is on topic over on Christianity.SE even though it is the exchanges in chat there constantly raise the issue. This is a kind of thought experiment. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a…
Caleb
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Why do humans desire and admire beauty?

What is it that causes the human person to recognize beauty? I think its safe to say that everyone, to some extent, has experience some sort of perception of transcendent beauty. This recognition of beauty could be an encounter with the music of…
Charles Alsobrook
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literature and theories of man's encounter with himself

I am planning on writing a paper on what Sellars calls "the paradox of man's encounter with himself" (Sellars Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man 1962: 6). To quote Sellars in more detail: "[...] I want to highlight [...] what might be…
alex
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How does Penrose's ideas in "Shadow of the mind" hold up more than twenty years later?

In the book Shadow of the mind, Penrose argues that Human consciousness is strictly non computational based on some logic arguments. I have talked to some peers related to logic, and they seem to have dismissed Penrose on being a crank here, but,…
Reine Abstraktion
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Can society exist without hierarchy?

If we consider "a society" to be a group of individuals within the same species who cooperate for the benefit of the group as a whole, then it is reasonable to say that all human societies are hierarchical to some degree. Several well known…
Jonno Bourne
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Is Morality an end in itself or a means to a higher end, and if the latter, what is the higher end?

If morality is nothing more than an evolutionary by-product, i.e. a tool developed for the purpose of prolonging one's existence and/or facilitating reproduction, it seems to make little sense to criticise a person who loses morality if they do so…
user3918
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Is modern information technology fundamentally changing the way humans acquire and process knowledge?

It would appear that in the contemporary world, it is hardly necessarily for the individual to 'know' anything. Far more important is the ability to cull knowledge from readily available repositories of knowledge: google, wikipedia, etc. On the…
Vector
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Is there any author that argues for radical moral pluralism?

Let me first clarify what I mean with "radical" here. While many modern authors, if not all, accept moral pluralism of sorts, all that I know of express either the hope, if not the conviction, that there is some sort of baseline agreement or common…
Philip Klöcking
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Is our "meaning of life" fundamentally different from that of other animals?

Whatever the "meaning of life" may be (I interpret "meaning" as "purpose" here) is for us, Homo Sapiens, do we assume the "meaning of life" for humans differs fundamentally from the "meaning of life" of other animals?
Volker Siegel
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What does Ortega y Gasset mean by "art is dehumanizing"?

In "Man and People", Ortega discusses the dehumanization of art, which is made confusing from his repeated switching between speaking literally and speaking philosophically, and by virtue of his work being a translation rather than the original…
Alexander
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