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“Ressentiment” describes feelings of resentment towards the perceived source of one’s powerlessness. Friedrich Nietzsche used “ressentiment” to lay the groundwork for his concept of “slave morality” as a psychological defense against the implication of one’s inferiority. Specifically, Nietzsche argued that those without power resent those who do have power, and they react by creating a system of…
Hedonism is a philosophy that places pleasure as the highest goal of life. Psychological hedonism is a descriptive theory that posits humans are driven by the desire to maximize pleasure while minimizing pain, similar to Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle. Ethical hedonism is a prescriptive theory that people should place pleasure as their highest goal in life and that pleasure is inherently…
Metascience can be described simply science of science. Contrary to the expectations that science is inherently an objective pursuit of the truth in contrast to religion and spirituality as intuitive or anecdotal approaches, there are lots of subjective elements in the design of experiments, interpretation of their results, and inclusion of evidence in the development of scientific theories.
In Ancient Greek, entheos is formed out of en (within) and theos (god), forming the phrase “the god within.” It was used to describe people who appeared so passionate or talented that they seemed possessed by some kind of divinity. The word “enthusiasm” comes out of “entheos” and originally referred to operating with something that seems like a divine inner spark.
In philosophical and psychological contexts, “ego” doesn’t have the connotation of a negative byproduct of arrogance or narcissism; instead, it refers to an aspect of our identity that we construct as the “I.” Unconscious or subconscious feelings are generally considered outside of the ego’s scope. In casual usage, we might say something like “you have such a huge ego, you’re impossible to talk…
In Freudian psychology, the death drive is the concept that all living things have an intrinsic desire to achieve a permanent state of peace by reverting to a state of non-living inanimacy. Freud’s early psychological theories proposed that humans are wired to seek pleasurable experiences while avoiding painful ones, which he termed the pleasure principle. Dreams were proposed as unconscious…
Nelson Goodman proposed the Grue Paradox, also called the Grue Problem or the New Riddle of Induction, to discuss a problem within the philosophy of science where categories constructed from present evidence can fail to predict future cases. Simply put, let’s say we can observe that objects in a bucket are either green or blue today. However, after 10 years, we observe that some green objects…
“Anatta” is a Buddhist concept of “non-self” that eschews Western tendencies toward an “authentic” or “core” self, instead building a formulation of identity along the principles of impermanence, interconnectedness, and dependent origination.
“Determinism” are ideas
A “cosmology” is a study or body of work exploring the origin and structure of the universe as reality. Recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Recovery Dharma are inspired by religious systems while those like SMART Recovery are rooted in the guidelines of scientific institutions, but each group has its own cosmological foundations. I would argue that a strong portion of one’s…