Ten Philosophical Ideas for the 21st Century

By Betty Bassett

Philosophers have given answers to many dilemmas we face in life. Here are some quandaries they have considered:

What is the meaning of life?  What prescribes good or bad?  What is justice? Philosophers have been wrangling with these kinds of questions for a long time.  Even though there isn't a single answer that everyone can agree on, it's still important to weigh in some of the conclusions that philosophers have derived. 

1. Existential Crisis

Existentialism's main point is that everyone is different. "The philosophy of being" is another name for it. The idea started with Sren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher. 

If a person feels like they have lost the point in living life or a reason for existing, then they are termed as having an existential crisis. 

An existential crisis can be caused by a bad situation, economic uncertainty, illness, a near death experience, or having to deal with change. 

The idea of an "existential crisis" came from the breakdown of traditional values. It goes against the deepest part of us that wants to think that everyone's life is important. Existentialism says that a person's life is worth what they get out of it, what choices they make, and what they do.

2. The Golden Rule 

Most of us have probably heard the saying, "Treat others the way you want to be treated." 

A German philosopher named Immanuel Kant  came up with the term "categorical imperative." This idea says that moral principles are always there and they don't depend on the situation. The imperative says that when deciding how to act, a person must always follow certain rules.

This moral idea says that a person should act in accordance with the maxim, "Treat others the way you want to be treated, which is a universal law. Kant also says that every decision we make is not just for ourselves, but for all of humanity as a whole.

3. Thinking About Yourself

Introspection is a way to learn more about yourself by noticing how you feel about things that happen in the outside world. People do introspection because they have a basic need to look at themselves carefully and figure out why they believe what they believe and if it's possible that they're wrong.

John Locke, a British teacher and philosopher, was the first person to use thinking about oneself to learn more. He did this by pointing out that there are only two direct sources of all knowledge: things in the outside world and the human mind.  It's possible that how a word is personally defined is different to each person according to their life experience. 

4. Solipsism

Solipsism is the idea that the only real thing that exists and is available is a person's mind. Mark Twain's story "The Mysterious Stranger" demonstrates solipsism:

"There is no God, no universe, no human race, no life on Earth, and no heaven or hell. All of it is a bad dream and a waste of time. You are the only thing. And You are just a thought—a useless thought that wanders aimlessly through eternity."

Solipsism says that a person can only know his or her own thoughts. A person's belief in the existence of things other than that will always be based on faith, because they cannot prove the existence of things beyond themselves. 

5. Theodicy

If a higher power made the world, then why is there suffering?  People who believe in God wonder about this at some point. Theodicy says that God is always good, so any bad things that happen in the world have nothing to do with God. 

The question is why God doesn't want to get rid of all the bad things in the world. There are four answers to this question:

1. Either God wants to get rid of evil in the world but can't

2. Either he can but doesn't want to

3. Either he can't and doesn't want to

4. Either he can and does want to

The first three choices don't fit with the idea of God as the absolute, and the last choice doesn't explain why there is evil in the world.

The problem of theodicy in monotheistic religions is that people believe that God is to blame for everything bad that befalls the world. 

One of the main ideas of theodicy is that God made the best world possible, so then only the best things reside in it. 

6. Moral Relativism

If good and bad were fixed ideas, they would be much easier to understand, but what is good in one situation isn't always good in another. In moral relativism, it's harder to distinguish the difference between right and wrong as everyone has the right to come up with their own values and ideas about what is good and bad. 

7. Determinism and Indeterminism

If we want to consider free will and fate then we need to look at the idea of determinism. Determinism is the philosophy of predestination, which is the idea that everything is connected and has a cause. Everything has been decided already. 

In the doctrine of determinism it states that there is no such thing as free will, and a  person's fate is set by God. 

Determinism says that nothing just happens by chance. Instead, everything happens because of a chain of events that people don't know about and that was planned.  Determinism rejects the idea of free will, which says that a person is responsible for what they do.  

8. "I Think, Therefore I Am" 

Rene Descartes termed the idea "I think, therefore I am." If you doubt everything, you are in good company and this is a good place to start. Descartes came up with this formula when he was looking for an unarguable, and absolute truth that could be used to build a foundation of absolute knowledge.

Descartes questioned everything: the world around him, his feelings, God, and what other people thought. The only thing that couldn't be questioned was his own existence, because questioning his own existence was proof that he existed.  The phrase "I think, therefore I am," said that the Subject was the most important thing, which meant that it could be used to build knowledge that could be trusted.

9. God has died

Fredrick Nietzsche did not mean that God had died in a literal way.  He meant that in the modern era, God started simply to be an idea inside people's heads. 

10. Plato

Plato was the first person to say that the "world of things" is different from the "world of ideas."  An object's idea is what it is, where it came from, and how it works.

The famous Platonic myth of the cave, in which people only see shadows of other people on the cave wall instead of real things or people, shows how the world is divided into the world of ideas and the world of physical things. 

Plato saw the cave as a metaphor for our world. People think that the only way to find  the truth is to study the shadows cast upon the cave walls but in doing so your eyes are tricking you.  It is hard for people to doubt what they think they know. It is hard for people to doubt what they think they see.