All problems

Survival is what we have most reason to desire and least means to verify: is a consoling belief thereby suspect, or does the origin of a hope say nothing about its truth?

Does survival rest on the soul's nature, or on an act of God restoring the whole person, body included? Athens and Jerusalem part ways here, and the re-created body poses a riddle: would it be the same one, or a perfect copy?

Works, children, and memory prolong a name, not a consciousness: does this immortality by proxy deserve the word survival, or is it a consolation that changes the subject?

If no substantial self travels from life to life, what is reborn, and in what sense do my present deeds concern the one who will inherit their fruit? Is the flame that lights another the same flame or another?

The mind is born, matures, and fails with the body, is befuddled by its wine, goes out under a blow: do these bonds prove that thought dies with the flesh, or only that the instrument conditions the playing without being the musician?

When entire devices are designed to capture every available minute, is diverting oneself still a choice one owns, or must attention be defended as a scarce good, diversion ceasing to be an art the moment it is administered?

Faced with devices designed to capture it, can we really reclaim our attention by working at it, withdrawing, fasting from the feed, returning to the present, or do such techniques only paper over a trouble far larger than us?

"All of humanity's unhappiness comes from one thing, not knowing how to stay quietly in a room": if we flee calm, is it the misery of our condition surfacing the moment the noise stops, as Pascal diagnoses, or is the mind simply made for movement rather than for facing itself?

Does the aesthetic life rest first on the pleasures of the senses, falling then under the same suspicion as they do, or on a form that transcends them?

Is beauty a mere ornament, or what redeems an otherwise absurd or suffering existence and makes it bearable?

Is the aesthetic life about gathering beautiful experiences as a connoisseur, or about fashioning oneself as a work by giving one's existence style?

Are the beautiful and the good one, or are they rivals: does beauty raise the soul toward the good, or seduce it by flattering appearances against duty?

Is beauty a real perfection of things, or merely a pleasure of taste? If it is all a matter of taste, its claim to count in a flourishing life weakens.

If the exact organization of your brain were reproduced by a whole people passing messages, would that crowd really think, or do only certain materials yield a mind?

A program processes signs outside any world; but grasping a situation, acting with tact, may require a living body that inhabits it, which the disembodied machine lacks.

Reasoning is one thing, feeling another: a machine might compute everything without there being "something it is like" to be it, thought with no consciousness at all.

If a machine thought, would it have interests, a dignity, rights, or would it remain a thing we dispose of, owing it nothing?

If only the greatest good counts, morality seems to demand sacrificing everything for others without limit: can it really ask that, or must it leave room for our own lives?

Do some acts, such as lying or letting an innocent die, stay forbidden even when they would avert a disaster, or does everything give way before the scale of the consequences?

Is morality a matter of acts to be judged one by one against rules, or first of all a matter of a person's character, of who one is and how one has learned to see situations?

Can goodness be taught, like a body of knowledge, or is it acquired through habit? And how is it that we sometimes know the good yet fail to do it?

Is judging morally a matter of rising to principles that hold for everyone regardless of persons, or is concrete attentiveness to those close to us the very heart of morality?

Consequences, duty, virtue, care: are these rival theories of which only one can be true, or the facets of a single morality that nothing compels us to unify?

We judge the reckless driver who ran over a child more harshly than the equally reckless one who happened to meet none: does the moral worth of an act depend on results we do not control?

Is acting well a matter of applying principles fixed in advance, or of judging each situation in its singularity, at the risk that rule and case never quite coincide?

What makes a moral criterion binding on us: reason, nature, a shared sentiment, society, or God? And if nothing grounds it, does morality still have any hold?

We do not mourn the non-being that came before our birth: why dread the one that will follow our death? And how could death be an evil if no one is left to suffer it?

Faced with a life become unbearable, is ending one's days the ultimate freedom, the Stoics' "open door", or a wrong against oneself and others?

What if death were no longer a fate but a disease to cure: should we push back our limits endlessly through technology, or is there a wisdom in consenting to our mortal condition?

Does the soul, or something of us, escape the dissolution of the body, or does consciousness go out with it: and if a part survived, would it still really be us?

Since death erases everything, does what we do still have meaning, or can something be fully worthwhile without lasting forever?

Failing a survival of the soul, to live on in what we leave behind, children, a work, a trace in memory: a real victory over death, or a consolation that no longer concerns us once we are gone?

Is my death my ownmost possibility, the one that individualizes me and returns me to myself, or an absurd limit from outside that ends my possibilities without revealing anything to me?

Death reaches us first in the death of those we love: is this grief "nothing", or does it teach us, better than any theory, what dying means?

Do we deserve the fruits of talents and efforts of which we are not the ultimate authors? If our gifts come down to a natural lottery, is meritocracy just?

Do we owe the same distributive justice to all of humanity, or do our duties of sharing stop at the members of our own political community?

Does every redistribution restrict the liberty of those it taxes, or does real liberty already presuppose a certain equality of means?

Is equality a matter of shares to be distributed, or first of all a certain relation between persons, without domination or hierarchy, in which no one stands above another?

To distribute fairly, should one equalize incomes, resources, well-being, or each person's real capabilities to act? One cannot be just without first saying which advantage is at issue.

Is justice satisfied once everyone has the means to lead a decent life? What remains is to say what having enough means, and in the name of what a threshold is deemed sufficient.

If I own myself and the fruits of my labor, is taxing my earnings a kind of forced labor, or does property already presuppose a social order that makes it possible?

Should we distribute according to need, according to merit, or equally among all? Three criteria of the just share that sketch three different societies.

Supposing we have a nature, does it tell us how to live? Does knowing what we are settle what we ought to become, or is there a leap from the one to the other?

The injunction "be yourself" is itself divided: is self-realization bringing to light a self already there, or freely inventing one? "Become who you are" tries to hold both at once.

Are the great categories of identity, gender, race, anchored in a nature, or historical constructions we mistake for natures?

Are our behaviors explained first by a shared human nature, or by the culture that shapes us?

If things have an essence, where do they get it: from a plan that conceives them before they exist, from nature itself, from a convention of our minds, or from nothing?

Must the series of causes have a first term that depends on nothing, and why would that term escape the question we put to everything else?

If God exceeds every concept, can one even affirm or deny his existence, or does the question wrongly assume he is one object among others?

Can testimony make believable an event that contradicts the regular course of nature, or is it always more likely that the witness is mistaken?

May one believe only on the strength of proof, or is faith a legitimate venture that need not justify itself before the tribunal of evidence?

Without God, does life lose all meaning, or can meaning be built entirely on a human scale?

Does the good owe its value to God's will, or is it good independently of him? If God did not exist, would everything be permitted?

Would a God both all-powerful and good let the innocent suffer, or is the evil of the world compatible with his existence?

If belief in God can be explained by human needs, fear, desire, social order, must we conclude that he does not exist, or does explaining why we believe say nothing about whether the belief is true?

If God existed and loved us, would he let those who sincerely seek him search in vain, or is his silence one more sign against his existence?

Can one conclude, from the mere idea of a perfect being, that it necessarily exists, or is existence never deduced from a concept?

Is believing in God a matter of inferring it from arguments, or of relying on an inner experience held to be a direct encounter, one that would need no proof?

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned": is the God whose existence reason demonstrates, prime mover, ground or substance, still the one people pray to, or does proof only ever reach an impersonal principle?

Is forgiveness owed, as an obligation toward the one who repents, or is it a free gift, beyond duty, that can be demanded of no one?

Can one, and should one, forgive oneself, or is it merely a way of excusing oneself and escaping the guilt one deserves?

Forgiveness differs from excusing, forgetting, or condoning: does any of it remain once we have stripped away everything that is merely an erasing of the wrong?

Is forgiving to give up on justice and leave the wrong unpunished, or do justice and forgiveness aim at two different things that can coexist?

Can a nation forgive, through amnesty or reconciliation, the crimes committed within it, or does forgiveness make sense only between the persons who lived through the wrong?

Is forgiving to distinguish the wrongdoer from their wrong, in order to receive them beyond what they did, or is it to excuse the deed itself and betray those who suffered from it?

What is done cannot be undone: is forgiveness the only power that releases us from the irreversible, freeing us from the weight of what took place?

Is there in us a power able to initiate an action without itself being wholly caused, or is every power to act merely one link in the chain of causes?

Some religions affirm both that everything is in God's hands, predestination or fate, and that we remain free and responsible: can these two beliefs hold together, or does one ruin the other?

If everything has a cause, are my efforts in vain, since the outcome would be settled either way, or do they on the contrary count, being themselves causes among others?

Is being free to do what one feels like in the moment, or to govern oneself, at the risk that whoever follows their every desire becomes its slave?

Is being free to depend on no cause, or to understand what determines us, to the point of acting in accord with that necessity rather than undergoing it?

Even if I could not have done otherwise, am I free when my act springs from my own desires and reasons, with nothing forcing me against myself?

What weighs most in our freedom: our inner dispositions, or the outer constraints of power and society? And does one make the other possible: can one be free in spirit under oppression, or free outwardly without being free within?

When I act for a reason, does that reason explain my act the way a cause would, or are there two irreducible ways of accounting for an action?

If our choices are not determined, are they any freer for it, or merely left to chance? Does freedom come down to the absence of a cause?

A choice is an event in the physical world: does it belong to the same chain of causes as everything else, so that it was in principle predictable?

Am I transparent to myself when I choose, or do forces I am unaware of decide in my place, under the appearance of a free choice?

Grant that we owe the future something: what is the fair division of resources and burdens across generations, how much must each age save, and who bears the cost of averting a distant harm, such as the climate burden?

A right seems to require a bearer who exists; future beings do not yet exist, claim nothing, can do nothing for us. Can there be an obligation with no reciprocity and no one to hold it, or does our duty toward them rest on something other than a right?

Should a benefit or harm to future people count for less simply because it lies far off in time, as the economic reckoning that discounts the future does, or is that preference for the present a moral error, a mere failure of imagination? A very small annual rate is enough to make a distant catastrophe almost weightless today.

Do we have a duty to bring future people into being, or only, if they are to exist, not to harm them? Nothing seems to require us to create happy beings, whereas creating miserable ones would be a wrong; and seeking to maximise total happiness leads to preferring a multitude of barely-good lives to a small flourishing humanity.

Is the human a being apart, held by reason and spirit above nature and bearing a singular dignity, or a living creature sprung from it, continuous with the animal and subject like it to its laws? The posture one adopts turns on this.

Should nature be left wild and untouched, preserving the part we did not make, or is the ideal a tended, gardened nature that human care completes rather than violates? And is there any "untouched" nature left to save at all?

Is nature a wise order to imitate and respect, or a blind power that crushes and starves with no regard for the good? Does calling something natural tell us anything at all about its worth?

To command nature by understanding it has pushed back hunger and disease; but does the will to dominate it not turn into the domination of humankind, reducing the world to a mere stock on call? Does mastery emancipate, or does it impoverish both nature and ourselves?

Examining one's life, like acting, demands a resource everything competes for: attention. What we look at, and what we turn from, already shapes an existence; the question is what share may go to diversion.

Foundationalism assumes beliefs that justify themselves, a perception or an evidence so immediate it needs no other. But do we ever perceive anything pure? Even "I see red" already draws on concepts, memory, learning: if there is no truly first given, what does the whole edifice rest on?

A set of beliefs can be perfectly coherent and yet wholly cut off from reality: a well-built tale, a systematic delusion, a conspiracy theory that explains everything and absorbs every objection. If coherence is not enough to touch the world, must beliefs not also answer to something outside, to the experience that contradicts them?

Beyond what makes a belief justified, is it permissible to believe without sufficient evidence, or is it a fault, toward oneself as toward others? The question of warrant extends into that of the duty of belief.

To be justified, must one be able to give one's reasons, or is it enough that the belief was well produced? An expert "senses" the right diagnosis without being able to explain it; conversely, we would hesitate to say he knows, the one whose hunches hit the mark through a power he knows nothing of. Does justification lie in the reasons one can give, or in the reliability of the process, even when invisible to the one who exercises it?

Every belief rests on a reason, which rests on another: either the chain stops at beliefs that justify themselves, or it closes into a circle where each supports the others, or it runs off to infinity. These three exits are exactly the three ways of answering "what justifies a belief?".

The whole question of justification presupposes that there is a truth to reach. But when "alternative facts" and indifference to truth take hold, is it truth itself that wavers, or only our honesty in seeking it?

The classic definition holds knowledge to be a belief that is both true and justified. Yet one can believe something for good reasons, and have it be true, without thereby knowing it: the stopped clock we glance at just at the hour it still shows, the rock we take from afar for a sheep while a real one grazes behind it. The belief is true and justified, but it hits the mark by accident. Must we then redefine what knowledge is, or tighten what we are entitled to demand of a justification, until it links belief to truth otherwise than by luck?

From the strike to sabotage, from tax refusal to armed struggle: does just disobedience have internal limits, publicity, nonviolence, or does extreme oppression lift every bound?

Antigone buries her brother against the city's decree, in the name of laws no one has written: if there is a right above the laws, is a law that violates it still a law, or merely an order?

A law never arrives labeled unjust: someone judges it so. If each conscience decides which laws bind it, what remains of the law shared by all; and if none may, how would injustice ever be denounced?

No one signed a contract, and staying in a country is not consenting: one might as well say, with Hume, that one consents to the captain by remaining aboard on the open sea. If neither consent, nor fairness, nor utility grounds a general duty to obey, is political obligation an illusion?

If an artificial intelligence said it was suffering, should the sentience criterion be extended to it, or does moral consideration stop at the living, simulated suffering obliging us to nothing?

If sentient animals truly count, do factory farming, slaughter, and experimentation become wrongs that must end, even to the point of changing our lives and our plates, or can we owe them consideration without giving up the use we make of them?

To count, must one be capable of suffering, or is it enough to be alive? A tree, an insect pursue a good of their own: do they deserve our respect on that ground, or does life without sentience oblige us to nothing?

What gives a being moral worth: reason, as Kant held, or the mere capacity to suffer, as Bentham asked? Depending on the threshold chosen, the circle of beings that count opens or narrows.

Ecology values the integrity of the biotic community, even to culling the animals of an invasive species to preserve the whole: does worth lie in the whole, or in each sentient individual that such management sacrifices?

The whole debate assumes that animals feel something: but can we know it? Descartes saw them as machines without consciousness; how can we be sure there is "something it is like" to be a bat?

Is favouring one's own because they belong to our species a natural duty or an arbitrary prejudice, comparable to racism? And if infants or severely impaired humans count without possessing reason, can species still serve as the criterion?

If the suffering of animals binds us, does the suffering they inflict on one another bind us too? Should we intervene against predation and the ills of nature that we did not cause, or is that to presume it falls to us to correct them?

To grant that animals count, is it to place their interests on the scales of the greater good, sacrificing them if need be, or to recognise inviolable rights in them because they too are subjects-of-a-life?

If we must give as long as any misery remains to be relieved, what legitimate room is left for my projects, my loved ones, my tastes? Does a morality that absorbs a whole life demand too much, or is it our comfort looking for excuses?

If no one is wronged without their consent, does morality have nothing left to say? Mill himself refuses to let anyone sell themselves into slavery: is consent enough to permit everything, or are there wrongs we do to ourselves?

If distant misery stems from unjust institutions we benefit from, giving is no longer enough: the duty would be to repair and transform the order, not to give alms. Is individual giving a duty, or the alibi of an ongoing injustice?

Is letting someone die when we could save them as grave as killing? If the difference dissolves, the duty not to harm swells until it covers all the evil we fail to prevent.

The heroic act is admired, never required: there would be a realm beyond duty. But if all the good we can do is owed, are these acts that exceed duty anything but duties we excuse ourselves from?

Does a demand beyond our strength breed discouragement and hypocrisy, or must the ideal exceed what we are precisely in order to pull us upward? What morality may ask depends on what human beings can give.

Would a world cured of resentment be gentler or less human? To give up holding things against people, is that an attainable wisdom, or the end of person-to-person relations?

If every act has its causes, the excuse valid for one, the tumour, the constraint, should hold for all, and no one would be to blame. Unless the excuse precisely distinguishes between causes, and understanding is not excusing.

If no one deserves at bottom, retribution collapses, but is it to be mourned? Protecting, deterring, and repairing may suffice to ground punishment, without ever speaking of a debt.

Does assigning blame presuppose a merit grounded in metaphysics, or does the practice carry itself, no discovery about determinism able to make us treat persons as objects?

The drunk man no longer controls himself, but he made himself so, glass after glass: for Aristotle, we impute the disposition one has let grow. Yet to be accountable for one's character, would one not have to have chosen it, and so on to infinity?

Do I have a nature that precedes me and that I have to discover, or do I become what I choose to be, with no model fixed in advance?

Does one become oneself through introspection alone, as a self-sufficient subject, or through the gaze and recognition of others, without whom the "I" would not take shape?

Is the "I" a convenient fiction, mistaken for a thing? And would letting go of it be a loss, or rather a deliverance?

Am I a unified subject who says "I", or an assembly of voices and forces sometimes in conflict, part of which escapes me and acts without my knowing?

Am I a thinking thing distinct from my body, or am I this very body, so that my identity would hang first of all on it?

Do my duties to my children or my friends arise from the bond itself, which obliges by its very existence, or are they my share of a concern owed equally to everyone, because each of us watches best over our own?

Compatriots are strangers: does patriotism nonetheless extend to them the loyalty owed to those close to us, like an enlarged family, or is it an altogether different attachment? Where our belonging goes first is a question with its own axis.

Our concern for others weakens as they grow distant from us, in space, in blood or in likeness: should morality build on this natural slope, or correct it like an inborn prejudice?

Loyal in friendship, devoted to one's own: what is a virtue in private life becomes favoritism and corruption once one holds an office; where does the line run between loving one's own and being unjust to everyone else?

Do tragedy, the novel, the poem disclose truths about the human condition that no scientific statement could formulate, or do they offer only an enjoyment with no knowledge-value?

"Only science gives knowledge": but this statement is not itself scientific, it is a philosophical claim about science. In claiming to ground everything on science, does it not saw off the branch it sits on?

To study man, history, a society, is it to seek causes as in physics, or to understand a meaning and intentions from within? One method for all objects, or other kinds of knowledge for what does not reduce to a mechanism?

Do religious faith and mystical experience give access to the real that science could not judge, or do they belong to a belief that is nothing like knowledge?

Science tells the how, never the why or what is worth doing: it could answer all its possible questions without having even touched what gives a life its meaning. Are there truths, about meaning or the good, beyond its reach?

Do scientific theories describe reality as it is, down to the entities we cannot see, or are they only convenient instruments for prediction and action?

What separates a science from a belief that puts on its appearances, astrology or a doctrine that nothing could disprove? Its capacity to expose itself to the verdict of the facts, or is another criterion needed, if a sharp boundary exists at all?

Every law takes something from what I may do; where laws fall silent, I do as I please. Yet without law the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and a people gives itself laws precisely to be free. Does law limit freedom, protect it, or constitute it?

If freedom is won within, a clear-eyed person can be free even under a tyrant. Is that inner refuge the one thing no power can confiscate, or a consolation that teaches the oppressed to put up with their chains?

From seatbelt laws to compulsory schooling to the addict weaned off against their will: can coercion make a person free? And if my "true" will can be invoked against the will I actually express, who decides which one is me?

The law forbids no one to travel, study, or start a business, yet without money, health or connections none of it is within reach. Is the penniless person unfree, or merely unable? And does calling poverty a lack of freedom sharpen the idea of liberty, or dissolve it?

One age placed freedom in sharing public power, another in the quiet enjoyment of private life. If the moderns desert the assembly to cultivate their independence, do they hand over the very guarantee of that independence?

Every reason rests on another reason: does the chain stop at a foundation, turn in a circle, or run off to infinity? This is the skeptic's lever.

If nothing is certain, can we still act and choose, or does suspending judgment make life impossible: is fallibilism, acting on one's best reasons while staying open to revision, the way out?

Long the very model of certainty, do mathematics escape all doubt, or do the choice of axioms and the limits revealed by the incompleteness theorems show that even here certainty has a horizon?

Even granting our perceptions are coherent, do they reach things as they are, or only our representations, with no way to compare the two?

When someone as informed and rigorous as I am reaches the opposite conclusion, must I temper my confidence, like the skeptic who makes isostheneia a rule, or may I hold firm on the strength of the examination I have carried out myself?

The sun has always risen, but what guarantees it will rise tomorrow? No accumulation of observations proves a law: does our trust in the future rest on reason, or on habit alone?

Do my desires arise from me, or do I desire what others desire, what society manufactures for me? If they are not my own, affirming or sorting them takes on a different meaning.

Is desiring a matter of lacking what one does not have, and so suffering an emptiness to be filled, or is it the overflow of a power that creates? On the answer hangs whether desire should be quieted or intensified.

Are there higher and lower desires, with some part of us meant to govern the rest, or is this ranking merely a morality imposed on a life that asks for none?

Every satisfied desire is reborn or gives way to another, and the pleasure subsides at once: can satisfying our desires ever fulfil us, or has desire no end, so that the only way out is to step outside it?

No one voted for the smartphone or for artificial intelligence, yet they reorganize our lives: can the adoption of a technology be a common decision, or is it a force that imposes itself and gets debated only after the fact?

Technical means accumulate: each generation inherits the machines and knowledge of all those before it; the wisdom to use them, however, cannot be stockpiled and must be won anew by each of us. Is this gap between power and discernment a lag that education could close, or does it widen by its very nature?

When technology no longer transforms the world but its author, healing shades into enhancing: that threshold is a question in its own right.

Since Bacon and Descartes, technology has promised to make us "as it were masters and possessors of nature"; it has pushed back hunger and disease, but it also unleashes forces no one governs: is this half-kept mastery on its way, or contradictory in its very principle?

Plato already feared that writing would weaken the very memory it claimed to serve; every tool that extends us relieves us of a capacity, down to the assistant that now thinks in our place: where does service end, where does dispossession begin?

Science is supposed to start from the facts, neutral and given. But do we ever observe a pure fact? What we notice, what we take for a result, already depends on our expectations, our instruments, and the theory we have in mind: two scientists before the same sky do not see the same thing there. If observation is always oriented, what does science take its support from?

A general law extends to all cases what has been established of only a few: that the sun has always risen does not prove it will rise tomorrow, for nothing guarantees that the unobserved will behave like the observed, nor the future like the past. No accumulation of evidence fills this gap: it is the challenge each method must meet in its own way.

What if there were no universal rule of sound scientific reasoning? Feyerabend argues that the great discoveries often broke the canons of method, and that in science "anything goes": the logic reconstructed after the fact is not what actually advances knowledge.

An instrument does not record a bare fact: a thermometer presupposes a whole theory of heat, an apparatus assumes hypotheses about what it captures, and every calibration rests on other measurements, themselves fallible. The precision it displays may thus silently carry forward debatable theories, and exactness become a pretension rather than a fact. How far does a measurement establish the real, rather than already giving it form?

Does the method that tests the laws of nature hold for history, society, the mind? To explain by causes, as in physics, or to understand meanings from within, as Dilthey and Weber would have it: do the human sciences have their own logic, or does a single method govern all knowledge?

Does the philosophers' logic describe what laboratories actually do, the discussion, the consensus, peer review, the building of models and simulations? Or is the real method first a social practice, which the logical reconstruction idealizes after the fact?

What separates a science from a doctrine that puts on its airs, astrology, a theory that nothing could belie? The question of demarcation extends that of method.

No accumulation of evidence proves a universal law; a single counter-example, on the other hand, seems enough to refute it: evidence would then count only by its power to belie, never to establish. But does it even truly refute? When a result contradicts a theory, it is never that theory alone that is at stake, but a whole bundle of auxiliary hypotheses, and one can always sacrifice one of them to save it. Prove, refute, or only make more or less probable: what, exactly, can evidence do?

"All ravens are black" is equivalent to "everything non-black is a non-raven", which a green apple would then confirm, without one's having seen a single raven. And the same past observations equally support incompatible predictions. What, exactly, does a piece of evidence confirm, and by how much?

Is hope, which binds us to things beyond our power, a weakness that disturbs the soul, or the very spring that drives us to transform what can be transformed?

The past is what is no longer up to us par excellence: should we accept it fully, even to the point of willing that it was, or stay its prisoner through regret?

What is not up to me alone, illness, injustice, the course of the world, may be up to us together: by seeking power in the inner self alone, does the dichotomy ignore the collective action that shifts the limits of the possible?

Is the good of a life the peace of an untroubled soul, or the active achievement of one who transforms the world and leaves a mark on it?

Stoicism places our judgments on the side of what is up to us, but do we truly choose them, or are our opinions, emotions and desires dictated to us by the body, our history and the causes that make us? If even the inner world escapes us, does the dichotomy still hold?

If the senses can deceive us to the very root, as in dreams, can solid knowledge still be made to rest on them?

What if the mind did not merely receive the world but gave it form? Space, time, causality would then be less things observed than frames we impose on every possible experience.

Beyond the senses and reason, do our emotions let us know something of the world and of ourselves, or do they only cloud judgment?

Some knowledge seems to come all at once, neither by reasoning nor through the senses: the self-evidence of a principle, the sudden grasp of an essence, the certainty of the heart. Is it a higher form of reason, a kind of experience, or an illusion that borrows the name of knowledge?

Empiricism would trace every idea back to a sense impression. But when one ball strikes another, we see only two motions in succession, never the force or the necessary link between them: where, then, does the idea of cause come from?

Is the fear that grips me a thought appraising a danger, as the Stoics and then contemporary cognitivism hold, or the feeling of a bodily change triggered by perception, as William James would have it? What judges can be argued with and corrected; what shakes us can only be tamed.

When I say "that is wrong", am I describing something real, a property of acts, or only my preferences? Nothing in the facts contains an "ought": where, then, would the truth of a moral judgment come from?

Universal norms, but universal for whom? The status of rules meets the question of the beings they bind and protect: where does the circle of those who count end?

Is a norm inscribed in the nature of things, is it merely might dressed up as justice, or do we make it through a fair procedure? And can a rule that is merely constructed still bind?

Are human rights discovered, inscribed in our nature before any law, or instituted by conventions we could undo?

If all moralities are equal, in whose name condemn slavery or cruelty elsewhere? And is "we must respect other cultures" not itself a rule claimed to hold for all?

Knowing whether a morality can be objective does not yet say which one: is the right measured by consequences, duty, virtues, or care for those close to us?

To plant a tree whose shade you will never sit under: do we owe anything to those who will come, who have done nothing for us? Transmission turns the present toward a future that outlasts us.

The instant is a razor's edge: the past no longer is, the future not yet, and the present itself has no duration. Does "seize the day" then rest on an illusion, or is lived time a continuous flow that ceaselessly carries the past into the present?

We keep deferring living to a future that, often, never comes: life flows away while we prepare it. Yet if we project nothing, if we give up every goal, do we not lose what gives existence a direction and an impetus?

One can live turned toward a lost past: regret for what was, nostalgia for a golden age. Is it honoring what made us, or deserting the present for a country that no longer exists?

We are heirs: does fidelity to roots, to debts, to the dead make the depth of a life, or a chain that shuts the living inside a past that is over? For too much memory, too, can paralyze.

Is the highest good attainable here below, or does it lie elsewhere: union with God, salvation, a beatitude that neither earthly pleasure nor virtue can give?

Is happiness an activity, a way of exercising one's soul day after day, or the state of one who has all they need to be happy, whatever they do?

Is flourishing self-sufficient, or does it require friends and a city, so that one cannot be fully happy apart from others?

What if the highest good were beauty: making one's life a work of art, seeking the intensity of beautiful forms rather than pleasure, virtue, or serenity?

Can pleasures and pains be summed and compared, as the felicific calculus would have it, or is there in wellbeing something that escapes any common measure?

Is the highest good to enjoy as much as possible, or to free oneself from disturbance and pain, even at the cost of desiring only what is necessary?

Is a good life necessarily a happy one, or can it be full of meaning while being hard, demanding, sometimes unhappy?

Do we really know what would make us happy, or is happiness a shifting ideal of the imagination, so indeterminate that no firm rule can be drawn from it?

Is there a single supreme good that orders all the others, or plural and incommensurable goods that can conflict with no common measure?

Is a good life measured by the sum of its pleasures, or are some pleasures worth more than others, regardless of their intensity?

Does a happiness built on ignorance still count as a successful life, or is the good then missing one of its ingredients?

Is a life worth the sum of its good moments, or its overall shape, so that a life rising would be worth more than one declining, at equal total pleasure?

Among the life of pleasure, the active life turned toward the city, and the contemplative life, which deserves to be called the highest?

Is the good life the fulfillment of a nature or function given to us, or is there no fixed nature, each person having to invent what, for them, makes a life good?

Is wellbeing what one feels, or the fulfilment of what one truly wants, even when one never experiences that fulfilment, like a child who flourishes after our death?

Does wellbeing depend entirely on what each of us desires or feels, or are some things, such as health, friendship, or knowledge, good for us whether we want them or not?

Is a successful life necessarily happy, or can it be worthwhile through its meaning while being hard, demanding, at times unhappy?

Does the world carry an order or design that precedes us, as the Stoics and providentialisms hold, or is it silent? Constructing one's meaning, revolting, or renouncing all share the same starting point: nothing is given.

Does life have an overall meaning, an answer to « why all this? », or only local meanings, the ones we find in a love, a work, a commitment, even if the whole has none?

Does the meaning of existence presuppose a divine order that surpasses us, or can it hold entirely without God, on wholly human grounds?

If everything ends, through death and then the erasure of every trace, is what we do in vain, or can something have full meaning without lasting forever?

When the frameworks that gave meaning fall away, God, History, progress, does any meaning remain possible, or does the vertigo open in which nothing is worth anything?

Can a life be full of meaning if it is devoted to something trivial, or even bad, or does meaning require that the thing be objectively worth it?

Punishing as deserved presupposes the offender could have acted otherwise; if their act flows from their causes, their nature and their circumstances, does the very idea of desert still hold?

Does incarceration truly reform the offender, or does the whole penal apparatus do little more than produce and manage delinquency, in the service of an order and a power?

Treating crime as a sickness to cure seems more humane than inflicting suffering; but does reshaping someone « for their own good », without limit or their consent, respect them less than a deserved penalty?

Must the deserved penalty always be inflicted, or can clemency, pardon, and forgiveness legitimately set it aside without betraying justice?

Punishing to deter is using one man to frighten others: does only the penalty deserved for what he did treat him as a responsible person, rather than as a means?

Is the penalty handed down by the institution an impartial, measured justice, different in kind from revenge, or only revenge made public, orderly, and deferred?

Is the crime a debt to the order, settled by making the offender suffer, or a rupture between persons, repaired only by acknowledging the victim and restoring the bond? And how would added suffering pay for a wrong?

Is killing the criminal the only penalty matching the worst crimes (Kant), or a punishment that deters no better than another, forecloses any return, and lowers the society that inflicts it (Beccaria, Camus)?

Retributivism measures the penalty by the gravity of the wrong (eye for an eye), deterrence by what it takes to discourage: two measures that can demand far more, or far less, than each other.

What authorizes the state to inflict on a person what no private individual could: a power ceded by the social contract, or the moral order itself?

Does suffering carry a meaning, set within an order that gives it a place, or do we lend it one after the fact, to make it bearable?

Should we aim at the abolition of all suffering, whether by the spiritual cessation of the desire that breeds it or by an engineering that would erase it from our bodies? Would a life with no pain at all still be human, still desirable?

To pass through pain while hoping for an after, a healing, a salvation: is that the truest response to misfortune, or an escape that turns us from facing it?

Would a world without suffering be a world without compassion, without courage, without solidarity? Pity presupposes another's misfortune: must we then keep the evil for its fruits, or can we pick the fruits without the tree?

Perhaps it is not things that trouble us, but our judgments about them: suffering would not decide our happiness, only the steadfastness with which we endure it would. Wisdom, or denial of a very real evil?

There is a pain, that of the innocent, of the child, that nothing redeems and no meaning recovers: to claim to justify it, is that not already to insult it?

Is philosophy a body of doctrines, or first of all a way of life made of exercises that transform the one who practices them, since reduced to mere theory?

After centuries, philosophy has no settled results like the sciences and the same questions keep returning: a failure to dissolve pseudo-problems, or the mark of questions not meant to be settled once and for all?

Is philosophy the examination each person owes their life, in the agora with Socrates and under the motto "dare to know," or does it remain, through its difficulty and the leisure it demands, the affair of a few?

Is philosophy a proto-science that the sciences dethrone as they mature, or does it ask questions, about values, meaning, its own presuppositions, that no science can settle?

Are the great philosophical problems real questions, or knots of language to be dissolved rather than solved, at the risk of throwing out the questions that matter?

Can philosophy content itself with understanding, or is all contemplation already complicit, arriving too late like the owl of Minerva, when every thought in fact takes sides for or against an order?

Is philosophy's uselessness its very dignity, the one free knowledge pursued for nothing beyond itself, or a real defect next to the sciences and to action, like Thales falling into a well while watching the stars, to the laughter of the Thracian servant girl?

Free will excuses the evil humans do; but the earthquake, disease, the pain of animals are no one's fault: what then remains to absolve the creator?

What if the ends that justify evil exceed all human understanding? To Job, who demands an accounting, God answers not with reasons but with the sheer vastness of his creation.

Alongside evil, another absence accuses: that of a God who, if he existed and loved us, would not let himself be sought in vain.

Even without a strict contradiction, does the mass of apparently pointless suffering, a fawn dying alone in a forest fire, not make a good God who watches over all highly improbable?

Perhaps evil is permitted so that souls may mature, the world being "a vale of soul-making" rather than a paradise given ready-made.

Seeking a reason for the innocent's misfortune, is that not already a fault, an insult to their pain, and before some evils is the only fitting stance not revolt or silence?

One can save God's goodness by taking away his omnipotence: a God who withdraws and limits himself, or before whom evil is a rival principle he does not create.

Observing that nature made us compassionate states a fact; concluding that we ought to be so crosses the step from is to ought. If morality is only a feeling, what do we say to someone who does not feel it?

If we can tell how our values were fabricated (history, evolution, ressentiment), does their claim to the absolute collapse, or does a norm's origin say nothing about its validity?

If God is all-powerful, does the good depend on his will to the point that he could have commanded otherwise? Descartes ventures it for the eternal truths, Ockham for certain precepts of the moral law, and arbitrariness looms.

Can a rule that rests only on our agreement bind someone who withdraws from it? Custom binds as long as it is shared, but the reformer who contests it seems to appeal to something beyond it.

To hope is not to believe falsely: since the future is not yet settled, hope may escape the divide between lucidity and illusion altogether, unless it is illusion's most discreet form.

Withholding a diagnosis, embellishing a situation: deciding that someone will live better without a truth means judging in their place what it is worth to them; who has that right?

An ideal, a work of art, an "as if" we know to be fictions deceive no one: do such avowed fictions do the vital work we credit illusions with, without the price of falsehood, or are they just an illusion unaware of itself?

To stop dwelling on a truth that gives no purchase is not to deny it; but where does the line run between this wisdom of attention and denial, if discomfort gets to decide what we look at?

Choosing one's illusions would require believing at will; but can we really believe what we know to be false, or only arrange things so as not to look?

Many common orders rest on unverifiable narratives, from founding myth to official fiction: does a society owe its members the truth, or can it live on shared myths?

Is a lucid life better, even if troubled by what it discovers, than a happy life in ignorance? Is truth a component of living well, or an instrument worth only what it brings?

Progressivism assumes change tends toward the better, but does history have a direction, or is "progress" sometimes another name for a loss?

Does an institution's endurance prove its worth, what has held having proven itself, or does "it has always been so" also shelter injustices that have lasted just as long?

Technology transforms society whether we will it or not: is "progress" then a political decision, or a force that carries us along without our having voted for it?

Even when change is called for, should we reform step by step, at the risk of a slowness that lets injustice endure, or refound all at once, at the risk of undoing balances we never understood?

Do the living have the right to rewrite what the dead built, "the earth belongs to the living", or are we the trustees of a legacy we must hand on to the generations to come?

Do our most generous acts always hide an interest, a need to be loved, a vanity? If no truly disinterested act exists, talk of goodness loses its meaning.

Is the human a divided being, capable at once of the highest and the lowest, great through the very thing that makes it wretched, or is this dramatic image merely a way of ennobling a mere animal by calling it fallen?

The wager of education assumes we can remake people, soften them, better them. But are there immovable flaws, a "crooked timber" that no education ever straightens?

Should laws be designed counting on citizens' virtue, or built so that "even a nation of devils" would be forced to act well? One's vision of humanity governs the kind of institutions one deems necessary.

Asking whether humans are good or evil assumes they have a nature. But perhaps there is no given essence: humans would then make themselves, with no received model.

If humans do evil, is that bent in them from the start, a drive or a fallen nature, or does it arise from without, from social comparison and inequality? Depending on the answer, wickedness is our depth or our product.