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Big Questions: fun facts and quiz
The essentials in 7 ideas, with fun facts, an illustrated story and a quiz to see how much you know.
The essentials
What Philosophy Is
Philosophy asks big questions with no easy answers: What is real? How do we know things? How should we live? It uses careful argument rather than experiments.
Key fact
“Philosophy” comes from the Greek for “love of wisdom”.
Socrates
Socrates, in Athens around 400 BCE, questioned everyone about justice and virtue. He wrote nothing down; we know him mainly through his student Plato.
Key fact
“The unexamined life is not worth living” is credited to Socrates.
Free Will
Do we really choose, or is everything we do caused by what came before? Philosophers have argued about free will for over 2,000 years, and still disagree.
Key fact
Some philosophers think free will and determinism can both be true.
How Do We Know?
René Descartes doubted everything he could, and found one thing he couldn’t doubt: that he was thinking. “I think, therefore I am.”
Key fact
Descartes wrote it in French in 1637: “Je pense, donc je suis”.
The Trolley Problem
A runaway trolley will hit five people unless you pull a lever and send it onto a track with one person. Should you? This thought experiment tests how we weigh harm.
Key fact
Philosopher Philippa Foot introduced the problem in 1967.
The Ship of Theseus
If every plank of a ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? This ancient puzzle asks what makes something, or someone, stay the same.
Key fact
Your body replaces many of its cells over the years.
The Good Life
Aristotle thought the good life, eudaimonia, came from developing good character and living well with others. The Stoics taught focusing only on what you can control.
Key fact
Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as a private journal.
Fun facts
Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call himself a “philosopher”.
Socrates called himself a “gadfly”, stinging Athens into thinking harder.
In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet found brain activity building up before people felt they had decided to move.
Descartes imagined an evil demon deceiving him about everything, an idea echoed centuries later in The Matrix.
Most people say they’d pull the lever, but far fewer would push someone off a bridge to stop the trolley.
Thomas Hobbes added a twist: what if someone gathered the old planks and rebuilt them into a second ship?
Epictetus, one of the great Stoic teachers, was born into slavery.
Story: Nobody Is Wiser
Nobody Is Wiser
Athens, around 430 BCE. Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asks the Oracle at Delphi: is anyone wiser than Socrates? The answer comes back: no one.
Puzzled, Socrates questions politicians, poets and craftsmen. Each thinks he knows a lot, but can’t explain it. Socrates at least knows how little he knows.
Making important people look foolish earned him enemies. In 399 BCE, Athens sentenced him to death, and he calmly drank hemlock.
True or false?
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 10
Philosophy relies mainly on reasoning and argument.
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True. Philosophers test ideas by thinking them through.
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Question 2 of 10
Socrates wrote many famous books.
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False. He wrote nothing. Plato recorded his conversations.
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Question 3 of 10
Philosophers have fully settled the free will debate.
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False. It’s still one of philosophy’s liveliest debates.
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Question 4 of 10
“I think, therefore I am” comes from René Descartes.
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True. From his Discourse on the Method, 1637.
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Question 5 of 10
The trolley problem is a thought experiment about moral choices.
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True. It’s a tool for testing our moral intuitions.
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Question 6 of 10
The Ship of Theseus puzzle is about identity over time.
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True. What makes a thing the same thing as it changes?
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Question 7 of 10
The Stoics taught focusing on what you can control.
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True. And accepting calmly what you can’t.
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Question 8 of 10
Philosophy only studies questions that have been fully answered.
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False. It thrives on open questions.
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Question 9 of 10
Plato was a student of Socrates.
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True. And Aristotle, in turn, studied with Plato.
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Question 10 of 10
Some philosophers argue that free will and determinism can fit together.
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True. That view is called compatibilism.
Keep going in the app
KnowSoda learns what you know and brings back what you’re about to forget. Big Questions has 6 more ideas at the Advanced and Expert levels.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Socrates, free will, Descartes, the doctrine of double effect
- Philippa Foot (1967), “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”, Oxford Review 5
- Plutarch, Life of Theseus (c. 100 CE)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Stoicism, Aristotle’s ethics
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Rawls, personal identity, scepticism, Camus, qualia, hedonism
- Nagel (1974), What is it like to be a bat?, The Philosophical Review 83
