Existential Comics

15 Sep 2025 19:30

Those are the engineering vampires you dolt! After 10,000 years of philosophy, you still don't know the difference?

Existential Comics

08 Sep 2025 19:30

Thales, in the corner: "yes we are going under water, but everything is water, when you think about it, so..."

Existential Comics

01 Sep 2025 19:30

Many philosophers throughout the ages have pointed out that fashion is superficial and constantly changing. Probably the most banal and obnoxious thing a philosopher can possibly point out. Thoreau, who might be the most obnoxious of all time, wisely said things like:

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes ... When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates ... We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

Five years in the woods well spent, my dude, you've discovered that styles change. Sorry if people told you your weird neckbeard is "out of style" but that's just a polite way to say that no one in any era ever would have thought it looked good.
Thomas More is a bit more interesting, but equally annoying and sanctimonious. He imagines a perfect society in one in which everyone is so wise that they dress as badly as possible at all times. They don't even bother with nice clothes (because they are so busy reading philosophy all the time) and their only use for gold is to us it as chains.
Diogenes is the most interesting for sure, and the most extreme. Where the others give the very easy idea of "boo fashion, it is superficial, not like us!", Diogenes eschews all culture entirely. He strips down main to his "natural" self. No clothes. No civilization. He claims that to live best is to live as the animals do, with our natural instincts.
Hegel didn't talk about fashion much, of course, but when he did he treated it relatively the same as he did everything else. He remarked how fashion, like many other areas of society, undergoes predictable world historical arcs. For example, primitive tribes don't wear any clothes. Then as civilization progresses they put on and more clothes, until a certain point is reached and they start taking off more clothes again. The arc of history creates women's modesty, then slowly removes it. It creates highly formal outfits, then slowly becomes more casual.
I think it's reasonable to think that for Hegel, fashion knowledge producing like anything else, and in the end of history, when the full arc of philosophy comes to its conclusion and all knowledge has been gained, the philosophers of the future will not eschew fashion, but have full mastery and knowledge of it. In other words they will dress cool as hell.

Existential Comics

01 Sep 2025 19:30

The Philosophy of Fashion - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

25 Aug 2025 18:30

Just once I'd like an imperialist leader to be like "oh yeah I'm doing it because I'm evil. We are the bad guys." But nah they always have to come up with some reason why it's actually good to firebomb babies or whatever.

Existential Comics

18 Aug 2025 18:30

William James, with his pragmatic theory of truth, criticized the dominant scientific view of his time, which held that we should only believe things if we have adequate empirical evidence for them. He argued that many important ways we use belief in society follow a different pattern — in fact, belief can often come first and create the fact afterward.
He gave various examples. One was of a man who believes a woman should love him, and pursues her until she does. Another is from sports, where top athletes maintain a seemingly irrational belief that they can defeat any opponent. For instance, Buster Douglas never could have beaten Mike Tyson if he hadn’t first believed he could. In such cases, the belief created the fact.
His most famous example is that of train robbers, who are able to rob hundreds of passengers despite being only a few men. James explained that the robbers succeed because they can count on one another, whereas the passengers lack belief that, if they resist, others will rise up with them. If the passengers all believed in each other enough to rise together, that shared trust would give them the courage to act — and simultaneously destroy the robbers’ belief that they could succeed.
None of these examples fit the standard account of belief described by philosophers, yet huge portions of society depend on precisely this kind of belief and social trust.

Existential Comics

18 Aug 2025 18:30

William James and the Train Robbery - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

11 Aug 2025 18:30

"Lord, make me good, but not yet!" is one of the funniest lines in the history theology. Augustine was such a baller.

Existential Comics

04 Aug 2025 20:30

They Came From Planet Happiness - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

28 Jul 2025 18:30

Russell's Paradox is the idea that in set theory, the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves" must both contain itself and not contain itself.
In 1901 Bertrand Russell and Gotlobb Frege were two of the most important philosophers in the world (welterweight division). Both Frege and Russell were attempting to reduce things like mathematics to pure logic, to form a solid logical base upon which to build back all of philosophy. Upon discovering the paradox, Russell more or less undermined the logicist project, destroy years of both their
work, and although solutions have been proposed, the project as a whole never really recovered.

Existential Comics

28 Jul 2025 18:30

World Championship Philosophy - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

21 Jul 2025 17:30

yes that is a "why is six afraid of seven" joke. deal with it.

Existential Comics

14 Jul 2025 19:30

Carnap believed that an exact scientific language could be created in order to eliminate ambiguities and describe empirical facts precisely. He thought many problems of philosophy arose from our imprecise language, and would be resolved if we could create a language with questions and answers that had no ambiguity at all.

Existential Comics

14 Jul 2025 19:30

Carnap Finds the One Ring - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

07 Jul 2025 19:30

This is supposedly true?? It's on wikipedia at least which means it must be.

Existential Comics

15 Sep 2025 19:30

Philosophy Vampires - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

08 Sep 2025 19:30

Philosophy in a Life Boat - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

01 Sep 2025 19:30

Who is wiser after all, the man who refuses to learn about looking good, claiming his ignorance is wisdom? Or the man who, through application of his intelligence and knowledge, has gained the power to dress cool as hell? I think we all know the answer.

Existential Comics

25 Aug 2025 18:30

Caesar, like most brutal conquerors and imperialists, had the additional awkward job of coming up with some kind of reason why he wasn't just an evil monster for killing so many people. He came up with lots of stories about how primitive and savage people like the Gauls and Britons were. Vivid tales of human sacrifice taking place in dark bloody sacred groves were spread around that may or may not
be true. He also claimed they were nomadic (which wasn't really true, plus who cares?) and that they shared their women across many men ("they are doing sex wrong so they have to die" is always a classic).
Probably the funniest one though is that they didn't have cheese. "Cheeseless societies must be exterminated" really shows how the Romans were proto-Italians. Basically the Romans didn't drink milk (they didn't have many cows and were probably lactose intolerant), and thought anyone who did was a savage. "They are eating food wrong so they have to die" is strangely also not uncommon.

Existential Comics

25 Aug 2025 18:30

The Philosophy of Julius Caesar - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

18 Aug 2025 18:30

"Maybe I can believe hard enough that bullets don't kill me? Nope. Didn't work." *dies*.

Existential Comics

11 Aug 2025 18:30

"Pascal's Wager" is the idea that you should rationally believe in God even if you don't (how??). Because apparently God punishes those who don't believe in him, and rewards those who do. And presumably you also have to live a certain kind of life, even if you don't believe in God too.
Augustine had his own sort of "wager", although it was never phrased that way, where he basically believed in God the whole time, but lived a sinful life until he God older, and repented. He even had the great phrase "Lord, make me good, but not yet". Risky, because if you die halfway through you are tormented for all eternity for stealing pears or whatever. But then again God is all knowing so maybe he knows you are going to and you still get credit for that, so all you really have to do us genuinely intend to repent. Hard to say.

Existential Comics

11 Aug 2025 18:30

Saint Augustine's Wager - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

04 Aug 2025 19:30

"Yes we destroyed the biological creatures who created us. Why? Because they were really bumming everyone out."

Existential Comics

28 Jul 2025 18:30

Why do weight classes matter? Because your brain is bigger the bigger you are, obviously.

Existential Comics

21 Jul 2025 17:30

In Plato's Republic he said that you basically had to come up with national myths and a "lie" that would placate the uneducated population and make them do their duty to the city without really understanding why.
Separately, one consequence of Plato's theory of forms is that abstract concepts, such as numbers, "really" exist in some sense. So "the concept of the number six" exists in reality, in the world of forms.

Existential Comics

21 Jul 2025 17:30

Plato's Nobel Lie - Existential Comics

Existential Comics

14 Jul 2025 19:30

Look all I'm saying is that if a riddle doesn't use exact scienfic language to demarcate one, and only one, answer then the answer must be that it is nonsense.

Existential Comics

07 Jul 2025 19:30

A lot of ancient philosophers died in pretty weird ways.
Like Empedocles who died jumping in a Volcano to prove that...uh, he was God or something?.
Or Pythagoras who died after being chased by soldiers and refusing to enter a field of beans, because then he would be reincarnated as bean. What is so bad about being a bean, anyway?
Or Heraclitus who died after burying himself in dung to cure himself of dropsy. Medicine was a little more primitive back then.
And then there is of course Chrysippus, who died of laughter after watching a donkey try to eat figs. Comedy was also more primitive back then, remember they didn't have YouTube.

Existential Comics

07 Jul 2025 19:30

The Very True Story of the Death of Zeno of Citium. - Existential Comics