Philosophyspeaking topic
“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
hint ✧ The free will debate: our actions are free, but do we choose what we want?
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- If you felt no pain, and no hunger even while starving, survival would become impossible. Maybe pain is not a flaw but the very thing that ties you to yourself. Would a being that never suffers really count as alive?
- A single ant is stupid, but the colony acts intelligently: it builds bridges, farms, wages war. If the 'mind' lives not in the ants but in the connections between them, does your mind live not in your neurons but in the connections between them?
- At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.
- Sartre's bad faith: is escaping our own freedom by saying 'my role requires it' a lie we tell ourselves? If a person can choose at every moment, is 'I had no choice' ever true?
- Billionaire wealth could end extreme poverty many times over while half the world lives in it. Anger feels justified, but what would an actually effective response look like?