Stupid God, giving us eternal paradise. Who put this asshole in charge anyway?
And for my next trick, I will move my body around using only my soul! But my soul is immaterial and my body material, how I am doing it? Magic. That's how.
The wax "trick" is a reference to Descartes Wax Argument, in which he argued that even simple objects can't be known from only their empirical content, because that content can easily change in almost all regards without the object essentially changing. Further on in Meditations, he argues that the entire world could theoretically be an illusion, and there would be no way to discover this empirically, because our sense can be deceived.
Okay, I promise this is the last time I'll do a "radical freedom" joke. Although when you think about it no promise that I make today can actually determine my future actions, on account of...well, you know.
Thales is probably the oldest Western philosopher that we have record of, so in that sense he "invented philosophy" (although I'm sure there were people before him that asked the same kinds of questions, whose work was lost). His theory, basically, was that all that exists is composed of a single substance: water. Today we know that water is composed of other things, but the idea that everything is only different modalities of a single thing is still alive, whether that thing is a certain kind of boson, or quantum fields, or whatever. How Thales would respond to questions about whether abstract concepts like "infinity", or subject experiences like "sadness" were also simply made of water we don't know, but those kind of questions are probably what motivated Plato to have a more complex theory of existence beyond simply matter, in his theory of forms.
Anaximander and Anaximenes were students of Thales who worked on similar problems, who also believed in a kind of monist system, i.e. that reality was made of only a single thing.
Anaximander and Anaximenes were students of Thales who worked on similar problems, who also believed in a kind of monist system, i.e. that reality was made of only a single thing.
A true Übermensch spends Christmas miserable and alone, as everyone knows.
Nietzsche's doctrine of Amor Fati, to love one's fate, meant that a chief task in our lives is to affirm life and love one's destiny. He believed life to be deterministic, but we could not give in to nihilism or despair, and should love what must unfold. His own life was filled with hardships and disappoints, to say the least. He had constant problems with his health, multiple rejected marriage proposals, and as the comic shows he suffered a mental collapse and ended life in the care of his sister. She edited his final work, The Will to Power to suit her far right politics, and Nietzsche's ideas were used by the Nazis to justify their dominating the Earth. Nietzsche, of course, would have hated this. He wrote against both anti-semitism and nationalism in his life. The challenge, of course, for Nietzsche would then be what he thought was the challenge for all of us: to nonetheless love his fate.