Great Questions
One question followed across centuries and civilizations — who said what, in order, and who answered whom.
Are We Free?
Fate, karma, determinism, compatibilism, radical freedom — the long argument over whether we choose what we do.
Does God Exist?
The proofs, the refutations, the wagers and the leaps — the great argument about God from the Upanishads to Nietzsche.
How Is the Mind Related to the Body?
Witness-consciousness and matter, the soul as form, two substances, one substance, Dasein — the mind–body problem across civilizations.
How Should One Act? — Dharma, Karma and Freedom
The Indian argument about action — from Vedic sacrifice to the Gītā’s action without attachment, the Buddha’s intention, the Jain refusal to harm, Kauṭilya’s realism, Gandhi’s satyāgraha and Ambedkar’s constitutional morality.
How Should We Face Death?
Naciketas at Death’s door, Socrates’ hemlock, Epicurus’s argument, the Stoics’ rehearsal, Hamlet’s skull, Ivan Ilyich’s scream, Heidegger’s being-toward-death.
The Road of Nihilism
How “nothing matters” became an idea, a movement, a diagnosis, and a test — from Jacobi to Camus.
What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?
Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
What Is Beauty — and What Is Art For?
From Plato’s ladder of love and Aristotle’s catharsis to Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Schopenhauer’s music and Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus.
What Is Justice?
From Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger” to Rawls’s veil of ignorance — the question of what we owe each other and who should rule.
What Is the Meaning of Life?
Liberation, virtue, tranquillity, God, the will, revolt — the great answers to the greatest question.
What Is the Self?
From ātman to anattā, from the cogito to the bundle, from Kierkegaard’s task of becoming oneself to Sartre’s nothingness.
What Is the Self? — The Indian Argument
Three thousand years of Indian argument about the “I” — from the Upaniṣads’ Self that is Brahman, through the Buddha’s no-self, the Jain soul, the Nyāya substance, Sāṃkhya’s witness, to Ramana’s “Who am I?” and Ambedkar’s social self.
What Is Time?
Flux and permanence, the moving image of eternity, Augustine’s puzzle, Kant’s form of intuition, eternal recurrence, Heidegger’s temporality.