- Sophie's World
This is a book within a book: the inner book explores the entirety of Western philosophy, while the outer book tells the story of a girl learning about philosophy.
It’s like a better version of A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell—well, kind of. More seriously, it covers most major figures in philosophy and gives a solid overview of what they believed. It’s just that: an overview.Still, it’s a good book and holds some nostalgic value for me. I first read it when I was 14—it was my first real contact with philosophy. After that, I bought Plato’s Republic, didn’t really get it, and stopped engaging with the topic for a while.
But now, a bit older and hopefully a bit wiser, I really appreciate what the book does. It doesn’t just introduce philosophers—it places them in context and builds a whole narrative around what Western philosophy is really about.
- What if you slept?
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had that flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Lesions In The Brain
- Rapeseed
- Ancient Greek Logic
Both the Stoics and Aristotle developed logical systems in ancient Greece that competed during their time. But how do these systems compare? What distinguishes one from the other?
In simple terms, Aristotelian logic focuses on what can be deduced from a set of given statements. Stoic logic, by contrast, is concerned with the structure of the statements themselves—what truth values they can have and how those values relate to one another.
Consider this classic Aristotelian argument:
Premise 1: All men are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.Here, we begin with premises—statements assumed to be true—and use them to derive a conclusion. Aristotelian logic relies on quantifiers like all or some, but it doesn’t involve logical connectors such as and, or, or if…then between the premises.
Now let’s look at an example of Stoic logic:
If it is day, it is light.
It is day.
Therefore, it is light.At first glance, this may seem similar. However, the Stoic approach treats the entire argument as a compound statement built from smaller parts connected by logical operators like if…then. Unlike Aristotelian logic, Stoic logic does not use quantifiers—it works instead with propositional connectives and focuses on how statements combine and what follows logically from their structure.
One helpful way to distinguish them is this: to formally analyze an argument, we often need both systems. Aristotelian logic helps us infer new conclusions from general principles, while Stoic logic allows us to evaluate how statements connect and whether an argument is valid based on the truth of its components.
Both systems laid the foundation for modern logic. Aristotelian logic evolved into first-order logic, which includes quantifiers and predicates. Stoic logic, on the other hand, developed into propositional logic, also called zeroth-order logic, which operates on whole statements and their truth values.
So, rather than asking which system is “better,” it’s more accurate to say that they serve different purposes—and both are still highly relevant today. In fact, both are typically taught in undergraduate logic and computer science courses.