List of Paradoxes - Philosophy

Philosophy

  • Paradox of analysis: It seems that no conceptual analysis can both meet the requirement of correctness and of informativeness.
  • Buridan's bridge: Will Plato throw Socrates into the water or not?
  • Paradox of fiction: How people can experience strong emotions from purely fictional things?
  • Fitch's paradox: If all truths are knowable, then all truths must in fact be known.
  • Paradox of free will: If God knew how we will decide when he created us, how can there be free will?
  • Goodman's paradox: Why can induction be used to confirm that things are "green", but not to confirm that things are "grue"?
  • Paradox of hedonism: In seeking happiness, one does not find happiness.
  • Hutton's Paradox: If asking oneself "Am I dreaming?" in a dream proves that one is, what does it prove in waking life?
  • Liberal paradox: "Minimal Liberty" is incompatible with Pareto optimality.
  • Meno's paradox (Learning paradox): A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know.
  • Mere addition paradox: Also known as Parfit's paradox: Is a large population living a barely tolerable life better than a small, happy population?
  • Moore's paradox: "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is."
  • Newcomb's paradox: A paradoxical game between two players, one of whom can predict the actions of the other.
  • Paradox of nihilism: Several distinct paradoxes share this name.
  • Omnipotence paradox: Can an omnipotent being create a rock too heavy for itself to lift?
  • Preface paradox: The author of a book may be justified in believing that all his statements in the book are correct, at the same time believing that at least one of them is incorrect.
  • Problem of evil (Epicurean paradox): The existence of evil seems to be incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect God.
  • Zeno's paradoxes: "You will never reach point B from point A as you must always get half-way there, and half of the half, and half of that half, and so on..." (This is also a paradox of the infinite)

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Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:

    “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.”
    —Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

    “Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”
    —Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

    “That the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil:Min this the Vedanta philosophy and Heraclitus are my predecessors.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)