Stoic philosophy, above all else, directs us to concern ourselves with only that which we can control - namely our virtue. It is a philosophy that many athletes take on, consciously or unconsciously. For example, consider this Apolo Ohno quote:

It is not up to me whether I win or lose. Ultimately, this might not be my day. And it is that philosophy towards sports, something that I really truly live by. I am emotional. I want to win. I am hungry. I am a competitor. I have that fire. But deep down, I truly enjoy the art of competing so much more than the result.

Every athlete knows that victory isn't something you can control directly, you can only control how you train, how you prepare, and how you compete. The Stoic philosopher would then say that losing should not bother you whatsoever, so long as you know that you did everything properly along the way. The fact that someone better came along, or you got injured, or slipped on the ground, or anything else beyond your control should not cause you any suffering or concern. You should only concern yourself with the things that you can effect.

Camus.

But actually Pythagoras was wrong, the perfect joke is made of water because everything is water.

Strawman Derrida defeated again!

Jacques Derrida is a French post-structuralist, best known for his "deconstruction" method. Throughout his career, and today, he is often portrayed as a kind of boogeyman of philosophy, who claims that everything is relative, any claim is just as true as any other claim, rationality is not desirable, etc. No one, Derrida included, has ever taken such a position. Deconstruction is, roughly speaking, an attempt to understand how we understand and interpret different texts. So to grasp the meaning of any given text, or even any given word, you must understand the network of related words, and the history of the meaning of the word and all of the related words. So Derrida is not against "rationality", what he is against is the belief that rationality, as a concept, has a timeless, pure, transcendent meaning, and that we can know what that meaning is. What he attempts to do is further understand the discourses of what rationality is in any given culture, giving greater clarity to the concept (although clarity is probably a bad word choice there, since he was never clear about anything).
Some of the text is based on Derrida's own answers to some of the charges against him, from this interview.
If you've noticed that the art looks a bit different, it is because I hired an artist, Noah Latz, to help me draw it. You can read the full story here.

"You've got to always look on the bright side of life.

Because any attempt to deduce the bright of life from reason alone will still rely on concepts gained from prior experience of the bright side of liiiiiife."

This comic is a parody of Monty Python's "The Life of Brian".
René Descartes is one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and in many ways he kicked off "modern philosophy". After Descartes, there was a big split in philosophy on the problem of how you acquire knowledge. People like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza were rationalists, believing that you gain knowledge primarily, or only, through the powers of reason. People like Hume, Locke, and Berkeley were the empiricists, believing that knowledge comes from our senses. Francis Bacon isn't generally important in the major arguments, but was one of the very early advocates of empiricism, and the "scientific method", just before Descartes came on the scene and the big debate between the two camps really took off. Obviously, this is a crude overview, and each philosopher had their own detailed opinions on how we gain knowledge of the world. The debate pretty much ended after Immanuel Kant solved philosophy.
You can read more about it on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.