⚔ 356 motions
Debate Club
Motions to argue about over dinner, in class, or with yourself at 2 a.m. Each comes from a page that gives you the ammunition. Draw one at random, take a side, and defend it.
Set-piece debates
Being vs. Becoming
Is change real?
Faith vs. Reason
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Sartre vs. Camus
Can revolutionary violence be justified by history?
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Where does knowledge come from — reason or the senses?
Śaṅkara vs. Rāmānuja
Is the individual soul one with Brahman — or a part of Him?
Gandhi vs. Ambedkar
Can caste be reformed — or must it be destroyed?
Can God Be Proved? Udayana vs. the Mīmāṃsakas and Buddhists
Does the world need a maker?
Is There a Self? Nyāya vs. the Buddhists
Does memory prove an enduring self — or only a continuous stream?
All motions
- Do we ever actually see causation? — Al-Ghazālī
- Can reason alone reach certainty about God? — Al-Ghazālī
- Is the pleasure of art a form of spiritual experience? — Abhinavagupta
- Can sorrow on the stage give joy — and why? — Abhinavagupta
- Can a poet belong to two languages — and make a third? — Amīr Khusrau
- Can an unjust social order be reformed from within its own religion? — B. R. Ambedkar
- Is political democracy possible without social democracy? — B. R. Ambedkar
- Who was right — Gandhi or Ambedkar? — B. R. Ambedkar
- Can reason prove that God exists? — Thomas Aquinas
- Is there a natural moral law that all humans can know? — Thomas Aquinas
- Can it be right to cause a harm you foresee but do not intend? — Thomas Aquinas
- What does it mean to love God as a lover? — Āṇṭāḷ
- Why would compassion open vision when meditation could not? — Asaṅga
- Can a person be happy without good luck? — Aristotle
- Is virtue really a mean between two extremes? — Aristotle
- Are some friendships merely useful — and is that bad? — Aristotle
- Does nature have purposes? — Aristotle
- Can beauty serve truth — or does it distract from it? — Aśvaghoṣa
- Can a ruler govern by morality rather than force — and remain a ruler? — Aśoka
- Was Aśoka’s dhamma Buddhism, or a civic ethic for all faiths? — Aśoka
- Can faith and reason ever genuinely conflict? — Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
- Should scripture be read literally or allegorically when it seems to contradict science? — Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
- Is evil a thing, or only the absence of good? — Augustine of Hippo
- Can you be good without wanting to be? — Augustine of Hippo
- Could you know you exist without any sensation of your body? — Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
- Is existence something added to what a thing is? — Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
- What does it mean to ‘systematise’ scripture? — Bādarāyaṇa
- Is evolution a spiritual process? — Sri Aurobindo
- Is a treatise attributed to a legendary sage the work of one mind or many? — Bharata Muni
- Can you think without words? — Bhartṛhari
- Who — or what — is Godot? — Samuel Beckett
- Is Beckett’s work hopeless, or a kind of courage? — Samuel Beckett
- Can art be made out of the impossibility of saying anything? — Samuel Beckett
- Is gender a nature or a situation? — Simone de Beauvoir
- Can I be free while others are oppressed? — Simone de Beauvoir
- Is love possible between equals — and what would it look like? — Simone de Beauvoir
- Can a religious community abolish caste — and survive? — Basavaṇṇa (Basava)
- Is there a self? — Gautama Buddha
- Is desire the root of suffering — or of everything good? — Gautama Buddha
- Can meditation be mapped like a science? — Buddhaghosa
- If life has no ultimate meaning, why not give up? — Albert Camus
- Can revolution ever justify murder? — Albert Camus
- Is Don Quixote mad, or is the world mad? — Miguel de Cervantes
- Is it better to live by an impossible ideal or by the facts? — Miguel de Cervantes
- Is ecstasy a form of knowledge? — Caitanya Mahāprabhu
- Is it the writer’s job to judge, or only to show? — Anton Chekhov
- Are Chekhov’s plays comedies or tragedies? — Anton Chekhov
- Is longing for a better life a kind of hope, or a way of avoiding life? — Anton Chekhov
- Do people always act in their own self-interest? — Nikolai Chernyshevsky
- Is ritual empty form, or the training ground of character? — Confucius
- Should rulers govern by example or by law and punishment? — Confucius
- Are family loyalties a virtue or a source of injustice? — Confucius
- Is it just to punish sin for eternity? — Dante Alighieri
- Should the virtuous pagans — Socrates, Aristotle — be excluded from Paradise? — Dante Alighieri
- Can romantic love lead to God? — Dante Alighieri
- Is returning to the oldest text the same as returning to the truth? — Dayānanda Sarasvatī
- How do you know you are not dreaming right now? — René Descartes
- Could a machine ever think — or only imitate thinking? — René Descartes
- Is the mind something other than the brain? — René Descartes
- Is knowledge a matter of truth, or of what works? — Dharmakīrti
- Can we perceive anything without already conceptualising it? — Dignāga
- If God does not exist, is everything permitted? — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Would you accept universal happiness bought with one child’s suffering? — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Do people really want freedom — or bread and authority? — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Is anything truly up to you besides your own judgments? — Epictetus
- Can a slave be freer than an emperor? — Epictetus
- Is death bad for the one who dies? — Epicurus
- Is a quiet life the happiest? — Epicurus
- Is non-violence a moral principle, or a political strategy — and does it work against a ruthless enemy? — Mahatma Gandhi
- Was Gandhi right about caste, or was Ambedkar? — Mahatma Gandhi
- Can a modern economy be built on village self-sufficiency? — Mahatma Gandhi
- Can a natural language be made as precise as a formal one? — Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya
- Is there a question that should not be asked? — Gārgī Vācaknavī
- If nothing has ever been born, who is it that seeks liberation? — Gauḍapāda
- Is logic a path to liberation? — Gautama Akṣapāda
- Can doubt be a form of faith? — Mirza Ghalib
- Is restless striving a virtue or a curse? — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Can a life be a work of art? — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Can a religion be founded on the denial of religious division? — Guru Nānak
- Does history have a direction? — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Do we only become ourselves through being recognized by others? — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Can a great philosopher’s politics discredit his philosophy? — Martin Heidegger
- Does facing death make life more authentic? — Martin Heidegger
- Can one person master everything worth knowing? — Hemacandra
- Is strife the engine of everything good? — Heraclitus
- Are you the same person you were ten years ago? — Heraclitus
- Is Achilles a hero or a monster? — Homer
- Is glory worth dying for? — Homer
- Would you choose immortality with a goddess, or mortality with the one you love? — Homer
- Is it rational to believe the sun will rise tomorrow? — David Hume
- Can you derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’? — David Hume
- Is there a self behind your perceptions? — David Hume
- Should anyone ever believe a report of a miracle? — David Hume
- Should the self be dissolved in God, or strengthened before him? — Muhammad Iqbal
- Does consistent reasoning lead to atheism? — Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
- Can interpreting a text be a philosophy? — Jaimini
- Should God be loved with erotic passion? — Jayadeva
- Can a commentary be greater literature than its original? — Jñāneśvar
- If God is everywhere, why go anywhere to find him? — Kabīr
- Can someone be guilty without having done anything wrong? — Franz Kafka
- Is separation more essential to love than union? — Kālidāsa
- Why does Duṣyanta forget — is it the curse or his own carelessness? — Kālidāsa
- Can a poet’s imagination of nature be a philosophy? — Kālidāsa
- Is an atom a discovery of reason or of experiment? — Kaṇāda
- Is it ever right to lie to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding? — Immanuel Kant
- Does morality depend on consequences, or on the form of the will? — Immanuel Kant
- Can we ever know the world as it is in itself? — Immanuel Kant
- Is human dignity really beyond price — or does everything have a price? — Immanuel Kant
- Does it matter whether the founder of a philosophy really existed? — Kapila
- Can a ruler be both good and effective? — Kauṭilya (Cāṇakya)
- Is espionage against one’s own citizens ever justified? — Kauṭilya (Cāṇakya)
- Was Abraham a man of faith or a would-be murderer? — Søren Kierkegaard
- Is faith a leap that reason cannot make? — Søren Kierkegaard
- Can one be free of all authority — including Krishnamurti’s? — Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Is it more rational to trust our cognitions by default, or to doubt them? — Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
- If the soul is already pure, why practise at all? — Kundakunda
- Can a mystic belong to two religions? — Lal Ded (Lalleśvarī)
- Is doing less sometimes the wisest form of action? — Laozi
- Can the most important truths be put into words? — Laozi
- Should government aim to do as little as possible? — Laozi
- Is this the best of all possible worlds? — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Why is there something rather than nothing? — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Is the mind a blank slate at birth? — John Locke
- When may a people overthrow its government? — John Locke
- Should the fact that we didn’t exist before birth console us about death? — Lucretius
- Can a good person be a successful ruler? — Niccolò Machiavelli
- Is it better to be feared than loved? — Niccolò Machiavelli
- Do ends justify means in politics? — Niccolò Machiavelli
- Is a doctrine of eternal damnation compatible with a loving God? — Madhva
- Is it possible to live without harming anything — and is it right to try? — Mahāvīra
- Can liberation come only from one’s own effort, with no grace at all? — Mahāvīra
- Is anything worth having that cannot outlast you? — Maitreyī
- Can a person be a philosopher and wield absolute power? — Marcus Aurelius
- Does remembering your insignificance make you better or more passive? — Marcus Aurelius
- Does your social class shape what you think is true? — Karl Marx
- Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost? — John Milton
- Can free will explain why a good God allows evil? — John Milton
- Was the Fall a disaster — or a fortunate fall? — John Milton
- Should any book be censored? — John Milton
- Was Mīrā a rebel, a saint, or both? — Mīrābāī
- Is it possible to know yourself when you change from day to day? — Michel de Montaigne
- Are we in a position to call other cultures barbarous? — Michel de Montaigne
- Can something exist without depending on anything else? — Nāgārjuna
- Could you will your life to repeat forever, exactly the same? — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Is morality the revenge of the weak? — Friedrich Nietzsche
- If God is dead, where do values come from? — Friedrich Nietzsche
- Can a language be completely described by rules? — Pāṇini
- Is change an illusion? — Parmenides
- Can you think about nothing? — Parmenides
- Is it rational to bet on God? — Blaise Pascal
- Why can’t we sit quietly in a room? — Blaise Pascal
- Does the heart know things reason cannot? — Blaise Pascal
- Were the grammarian and the yogi the same man — and does it matter? — Patañjali
- Should the wise rule, even without the consent of the governed? — Plato
- Would you be just if you had the Ring of Gyges? — Plato
- Is art a corruption of the truth or a path to it? — Plato
- Are mathematical truths discovered or invented? — Plato
- Should literature serve social reform? — Premchand
- Is religion a matter of experience or of belief? — Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
- Can one person practise every religion and find them all true? — Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
- Who is asking the question ‘Who am I?’ — Ramana Maharshi
- Can a teacher of Brahmin orthodoxy found a movement against caste? — Rāmānanda
- Is loving devotion a higher path than knowledge? — Rāmānuja
- Can a tradition be reformed by returning to its oldest texts? — Raja Rammohun Roy
- Is civilization progress or corruption? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Can someone be ‘forced to be free’? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Does inequality begin with private property? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Are we really responsible for everything we are? — Jean-Paul Sartre
- Is hell other people? — Jean-Paul Sartre
- Is life, on balance, more suffering than joy? — Arthur Schopenhauer
- Is compassion the root of all morality? — Arthur Schopenhauer
- Can a rich and powerful person sincerely preach poverty? — Seneca
- Is anger ever justified? — Seneca
- Is life short, or do we just waste it? — Seneca
- Is Hamlet’s delay cowardice, wisdom or madness? — William Shakespeare
- Does power always corrupt, as in Macbeth? — William Shakespeare
- Is life ‘a tale told by an idiot’? — William Shakespeare
- Is the world real? — Ādi Śaṅkara
- Is individual identity an illusion? — Ādi Śaṅkara
- If there is no self, why should I prefer my own happiness to yours? — Śāntideva
- Is the unexamined life really not worth living? — Socrates
- Should you obey a law you believe is unjust? — Socrates
- Can anyone do wrong knowingly? — Socrates
- Is it worse to do injustice than to suffer it? — Socrates
- Is Oedipus guilty — or a victim of fate? — Sophocles
- Was Antigone right to defy the law of the city? — Sophocles
- Is free will an illusion — and would that matter? — Baruch Spinoza
- Is God the same thing as Nature? — Baruch Spinoza
- Can God be loved best as a child? — Sūrdās
- Is nationalism a disease of the modern world? — Rabindranath Tagore
- Is truth independent of the human mind — as Einstein said — or not, as Tagore argued? — Rabindranath Tagore
- Is faith more admirable when it defies reason? — Tertullian
- Can an ethical code be universal if it comes from one culture? — Tiruvaḷḷuvar
- Do great men make history, or does history make great men? — Leo Tolstoy
- Should one resist evil by force? — Leo Tolstoy
- Can grief be the beginning of devotion? — Tukārām
- Is a translation that becomes more loved than its original a new work? — Tulsīdās
- Is rejecting all authority a form of freedom or of emptiness? — Ivan Turgenev
- Can the existence of God be proved — and if so, does faith become unnecessary? — Udayana
- Are you, at bottom, the same as everything else? — Uddālaka Āruṇi
- Can a criminal become a saint — and a poet? — Vālmīki
- How do you know you are not dreaming right now? — Vasubandhu
- Is service to humanity the same as worship of God? — Swami Vivekananda
- Can all religions really be true? — Swami Vivekananda
- Is optimism about the world an insult to those who suffer? — Voltaire
- Should we tolerate the intolerant? — Voltaire
- What does it mean that the author of the epic is also its grandfather? — Vyāsa
- Can there be a private language? — Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Is philosophy a set of problems to be solved, or of confusions to be dissolved? — Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Must we really be silent about what we cannot speak of — ethics, God, the meaning of life? — Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Is the knower something that can never be known? — Yājñavalkya
- How do you know you are not dreaming? — Zhuangzi
- Is there any perspective from which right and wrong can be judged? — Zhuangzi
- Is being useless sometimes better than being useful? — Zhuangzi
- Can rituals make us better people, or only better-behaved ones? — The Analects
- Can a religion be reformed without rejecting its scriptures? — Annihilation of Caste
- Was Antigone right to break the law? — Antigone
- Is Creon a tyrant or a ruler doing his duty? — Antigone
- When should conscience override the law? — Antigone
- Is a state that spies on all its citizens ever justified by their welfare? — The Arthaśāstra
- Why would God want to be loved as a child, a friend or a lover? — The Bhāgavata Purāṇa
- Is it true that hatred is never ended by hatred? — The Dhammapada
- Is eternal punishment ever just? — The Divine Comedy
- Why does Dante pity Francesca and then faint? — The Divine Comedy
- Can reason alone — Virgil — bring us to happiness? — The Divine Comedy
- Is Don Quixote mad or noble? — Don Quixote
- Does Sancho become more like his master, and his master more like Sancho? — Don Quixote
- Is the novel cruel to its hero? — Don Quixote
- Is Faust’s restless striving admirable or monstrous? — Faust
- Does Faust deserve to be saved after what he does to Gretchen? — Faust
- Would you trade your soul for one perfect moment? — Faust
- Is erotic love a fitting image of the love between soul and God? — Gītagovinda
- Is God closer in the temple or in the field? — Gitanjali
- Is Hori a victim, or complicit in his own suffering? — Godān
- If there is ‘no suffering, no path’, what is the Buddhist path for? — The Heart Sūtra
- Is modern civilisation a disease? — Hind Swaraj
- Can a nation be free if its people are not masters of themselves? — Hind Swaraj
- Is Achilles right to withdraw when Agamemnon dishonours him? — The Iliad
- Is Hector more admirable than Achilles? — The Iliad
- Does the Iliad glorify war or condemn it? — The Iliad
- Can one renounce the world and enjoy it at the same time? — Īśā Upaniṣad
- Why would knowledge alone lead to ‘greater darkness’? — Īśā Upaniṣad
- Can giving be too generous? — The Jātakas
- Is pleasure a proper subject for philosophy? — The Kāmasūtra
- Can you know something that can never be an object of knowledge? — Kena Upaniṣad
- Is Lear more sinned against than sinning? — King Lear
- Was Cordelia right to refuse to flatter her father? — King Lear
- Does King Lear show a universe without justice — or one where love is the only justice? — King Lear
- Is Edmund right that ‘legitimacy’ is just a social fiction? — King Lear
- Was Yudhiṣṭhira right to gamble — and to stake Draupadī? — The Mahābhārata
- Is Karṇa the true hero of the Mahābhārata? — The Mahābhārata
- Does Kṛṣṇa’s trickery in the war make him a villain, or does dharma sometimes require it? — The Mahābhārata
- Can a war that destroys nearly everyone be called righteous (dharma-yuddha)? — The Mahābhārata
- Is there a state of consciousness beyond waking, dream and sleep — or is the ‘fourth’ simply consciousness itself? — Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad
- Can a text be both a great work of law and an instrument of oppression? — The Manusmṛti
- Was the Manusmṛti a description of Indian society, or a Brahmin wish? — The Manusmṛti
- Why does longing make the world more beautiful? — Meghadūta (The Cloud Messenger)
- Can there be rebirth without a soul? — The Questions of King Milinda
- Can a comedy be political? — The Little Clay Cart
- Can a philosophy refute every view without becoming a view itself? — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
- Is all science and scholarship ‘lower knowledge’? — Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad
- Can one theory explain theatre, dance and music together? — The Nāṭyaśāstra
- Why should a book about logic promise liberation? — The Nyāya Sūtras
- Is Odysseus a hero or a liar? — The Odyssey
- Would you choose immortality with Calypso, or a mortal life with the one you love? — The Odyssey
- Was the slaughter of the suitors justice — or excess? — The Odyssey
- Is Oedipus guilty of anything? — Oedipus the King
- Could Oedipus have escaped his fate? — Oedipus the King
- Would it have been better for Oedipus not to know? — Oedipus the King
- Is cleverness a virtue? — The Pañcatantra
- Was Rāma right to make Sītā undergo the fire ordeal — and to banish her? — The Rāmāyaṇa
- Is Rāvaṇa a pure villain, or a tragic hero? — The Rāmāyaṇa
- Was Rāma right to shoot Vālin from hiding? — The Rāmāyaṇa
- Should a ruler sacrifice private happiness to public opinion? — The Rāmāyaṇa
- Did Tulsīdās improve the Rāmāyaṇa, or soften it? — Rāmcaritmānas
- Is the Nāsadīya hymn the first expression of agnosticism — or a deeper kind of faith? — The Ṛg Veda
- Should the Puruṣa Sūkta’s verse on the four varṇas be read as the origin of caste, or as a late cosmic metaphor? — The Ṛg Veda
- Can a text preserved only in memory for three thousand years be more reliable than one written down? — The Ṛg Veda
- If nature works for consciousness, does unconscious matter have purposes? — Sāṃkhya Kārikā
- Can a landscape express an emotion? — Saṅgam Poetry
- Why does the king forget — the curse, or his own carelessness? — The Recognition of Śakuntalā
- Is the reunion in heaven a happy ending, or a consolation? — The Recognition of Śakuntalā
- Is a God who is the ‘master of māyā’ a creator — or a magician? — Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad
- Is righteous anger ever a virtue? — Cilappatikāram (The Tale of an Anklet)
- Is bliss the deepest layer of the self — or a state the self passes through? — Taittirīya Upaniṣad
- Can a summary become scripture? — Tattvārtha Sūtra
- Is The Prince a manual for tyrants or a warning to the people? — The Prince
- Can ethics be written in seven-word lines? — The Tirukkuṟaḷ
- Is the Self an object you can find — or the one who is looking? — The Upaniṣads
- Are tat tvam asi and neti neti two ways of saying the same thing? — The Upaniṣads
- Why did teaching about the Self begin as a secret? — The Upaniṣads
- Is the goal of stilling the mind to see truly, or to stop seeing altogether? — The Yoga Sūtras
- Are the supernatural powers of the third chapter literal claims? — The Yoga Sūtras
- Is many-sidedness a theory of truth, or a virtue of tolerance? — Anekāntavāda
- If all views are partial, is the view that all views are partial also partial? — Anekāntavāda
- Is there one dharma for everyone, or does each person have their own (svadharma)? — Dharma
- Can a duty assigned by birth be a moral duty? — Dharma
- What should one do when two dharmas conflict? — Dharma
- If my present suffering is the result of my past actions, is it my fault? — Karma
- Does karma leave room for free will? — Karma
- Can karma be a moral law if there is no one to administer it? — Karma
- Is liberation the fulfilment of the self, or its extinction? — Mokṣa
- Can one be liberated while still alive and acting in the world? — Mokṣa
- Is liberation won by knowledge, by devotion, by action — or only by grace? — Mokṣa
- Is nirvāṇa extinction, or a fulfilment beyond words? — Nirvāṇa
- Can nirvāṇa be attained in this life? — Nirvāṇa
- Is there anything that does not depend on anything else? — Pratītyasamutpāda (Dependent Origination)
- Why do we enjoy sad stories? — Rasa
- Is the emotion of art the same as the emotion of life? — Rasa
- Is endless rebirth a hope or a horror? — Saṃsāra
- Without a permanent self, what exactly is reborn? — Saṃsāra
- If everything is empty, why does anything matter? — Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
- Is emptiness a fact about the world, or a way of seeing it? — Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
- If there is no self, who suffers — and who is liberated? — Buddhism
- Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, a psychology, or none of these? — Buddhism
- Did the Mahāyāna develop the Buddha’s teaching — or transform it into something else? — Buddhism
- Is love of God a path to knowledge, or above it? — The Bhakti Movement
- Did bhakti challenge caste, or merely make it bearable? — The Bhakti Movement
- Is God with form or without form — or both? — The Bhakti Movement
- Can you prove that smoke always means fire — or only that it has so far? — Cārvāka (Lokāyata)
- If there is no afterlife, does morality lose its ground — or gain it? — Cārvāka (Lokāyata)
- Were the Cārvākas hedonists, or simply honest? — Cārvāka (Lokāyata)
- Is human nature good (Mencius) or bad (Xunzi)? — Confucianism
- Should a son report his father’s crime? — Confucianism
- Is spontaneity a virtue — or just doing what you like? — Daoism
- If souls are graded by nature, is anyone responsible for being bad? — Dvaita Vedānta
- Can a realist theism be Vedānta, given the Upaniṣads’ language of identity? — Dvaita Vedānta
- Is it possible — or even coherent — to harm no living thing? — Jainism
- If every statement is true only ‘in some respect’, is the Jain doctrine itself true only in some respect? — Jainism
- Can a religion without God be a religion? — Jainism
- Can one argue without holding a position? — Madhyamaka
- If everything is empty, why does anything matter? — Madhyamaka
- If the world is God’s free play, is suffering part of the play? — Kashmir Śaivism
- Is recognising who you are the same as becoming free? — Kashmir Śaivism
- Can a text have meaning without an author? — Mīmāṃsā
- Should we believe what we perceive until proven wrong — or doubt until proven right? — Mīmāṃsā
- Is duty defined by a command, or by its consequences? — Mīmāṃsā
- Can you prove the existence of God from the existence of pots? — Nyāya
- Does a wise person argue to win, or to find the truth — and does the difference show? — Nyāya
- If perception can err, why trust it at all? — Nyāya
- If consciousness never acts, how does it come to be bound? — Sāṃkhya
- Why should there be many selves rather than one? — Sāṃkhya
- Is the world’s purpose really to liberate consciousness from itself? — Sāṃkhya
- Is it possible — or desirable — not to be disturbed by anything outside your control? — Stoicism
- Is virtue really enough for happiness, even on the rack? — Stoicism
- Should we love our fate, as the Stoics and Nietzsche urged? — Stoicism
- Is the arhat’s liberation selfish — or is the bodhisattva ideal a misunderstanding? — Theravāda and the Abhidharma
- Is the world fundamentally made of things, of events, or of relations? — Vaiśeṣika
- Can there be a real ‘absence’ — is the missing pot on the table part of what exists? — Vaiśeṣika
- Is yoga a philosophy, a religion, a therapy, or an exercise? — Yoga (darśana)
- Can stilling the mind reveal truth — or only peace? — Yoga (darśana)
- Why does a dualist system need God? — Yoga (darśana)
- Can we ever know that anything exists outside our experience? — Yogācāra
- Was Cordelia right to answer ‘Nothing’? Could she have loved her father better by saying more? — Cordelia
- Is Edmund right that legitimacy and custom are arbitrary? — Edmund
- Is Lear a tyrant who deserves his fate, or an old man more sinned against than sinning? — King Lear