In Buddhism, Metta meditation guides us to intentionally bring about feelings of love and compassion, leading to positive changes in our experience.

Diotima is a character in Plato’s Symposium that inspired Socrates’ vision of the metaphysics of love.

How do we know whether something or someone is good or evil? Are these moral concepts real, or are they constructions generated by timely conventions?

When you set high expectations for yourself, prepare for others to set high expectations for you as well.

Before Daoism, Ancient Chinese Philosophy was largely characterized by strict moral rules and metaphysical doctrines. Daoism’s dynamic departure from this denotes Heidegger’s “ontological difference.”

Zhuangzi’s Daoism in the Zhuangzi entails an emphasis on human freedom through doing nothing.

Heidegger is interested in the relationship of human freedom and agency with time. Dasein is both determinate and indeterminate —both a product of fate and a manipulator of outcomes.

Existentialism played a role in the development of contemporary psychology, so psychologists could benefit from explicitly studying the essential texts of existentialism.

Emptiness in Buddhism is often thought to mean “non-existence.” Emptiness as non-existence is, from a Buddhist perspective, but an incomplete picture of emptiness.

Philosophical zombies are an idea that consists of the conceivability of human copies without experiences existing.

Whether one is a writer, an academic, a scientist, or a doctor: whoever is committed to intellectual honesty knows that it can be a lonely way of existence.

Mental health awareness is increasingly common and visual on social media, in workspaces, and in campuses. But optics can be deceiving.

Academia —especially in the humanities— has had a precarious job market for a long time and will continue to have a precarious job market into the near-term future. However, the academic job market will soon clear up, due to the death and retirement of many older faculty.

Human life is finite and we can therefore never live a ‘complete’ life, which is something that is supposedly required in order to be authentic. Authenticity in almost all of its plausible forms, is essentially an illusory ideal we will never live up to.

Children should be taught philosophy from an early age because it improves critical thinking skills and has been empirically shown to improve standardized test scores.

The nature of mind —in particular, its qualitative character— can be understood through the observation of behavior from a 3rd-person perspective. This is especially the case if one is intimately acquainted with the subject in question’s behavior.

Friedrich Nietzsche was himself a prolific writer, whose works are well worth reading for anyone interested in unique writing. In much of Nietzsche’s work, he transiently gives good advice on how to be a good writer —or, as Nietzsche prefers, ‘author.’

Stoic philosophy teaches us to live, not in accordance with ideals or emotions, but with reason. This means having a deeper appreciation for life, its finitude, and the people around us who we share life with. Within the context of a relationship, it is clear then how Stoic philosophy applies.

It is an empirically provable fact that most people live a great temporal portion of their lives doing activities they do not find meaningful. Such lives more readily lead to nihilism and the solutions, while quite straightforward, are unlikely to be implemented.

According to the Dutch Golden-Age philosopher Baruch Spinoza, humans are captured by —in “bondage” to— their emotions, causing them to live substandard lives. It is only through reason and understanding reality that we can overcome the substandard life, by regulating our emotions, according to Spinoza.