Philosophy

I guess this was mainly a Continental thing, but for a while philosophers often wrote novels that in some way expounded their philosophy. I think Nietzsche was perhaps one of the earliest, with Zarathustra. All the French existentialists wrote novels, too. What happened to this trend?

EDIT: I just realised that arguably this goes back all the way to Plato! But I was thinking less of straightforward, largely plot-free dialogues and more of full fledged novels, like Sartre's Nausea.

Is there really no alternative justice system than crime and punishment? Seems that punishments are taken for granted as necessary and that we only debate on the reason it is accepted.

If not, can someone explain why it isn't?

Other than (metaphysical) anti-realism, which I'm under the impression is an umbrella for all types of denial that there is an independent, external reality.

I suppose you could even envision someone taking the stance that there is an external reality, because they have found empirical proof, which would make them a realist as well as a proponent of whatever this is.

The harm of religion is historically evident whereas the presence or absence of gods is not. Ultimately, the continued existence of religion is predicated on the indoctrination of children and suppression of rational thought. Therefore I am against religion but not necessarily against the idea of gods. For all we know gods are computer scientists and we are in their video game.

This is actually not stupid.

I also laughed when I first heard about it (5 minutes ago).

We focus a lot on managing time. But there are other finite resources we have to manage within each day.

• mental energy
• attention
• physical energy
• concentration
• frustration
• creativity
• patience
• many more

You can only spend so much of each one before becoming exhausted.

Spoon theory deals with one of these things - physical energy. And the article is well explained. So it's a good introduction to this kind of thinking.

You can go much further in this thinking than the article. Think about management. You normally assign tasks to whoever has the free time. But people have different amounts of patience to spend each day. So if one of your people has a lot of patience, you should assign him the task, because he can spend a lot before running out.

But if you have two tasks requiring a lot of patience, that guy might run out. So you assign the second task to someone else.

It's basically very intuitive. But it's helpful to think about it the same way we think about time. To quantify it.