In Crito, a private dialogue between Socrates and his close friend Crito is detailed by Plato. Socrates, shortly before his execution, is visited by Crito in an attempt to appeal to him to make an easy escape from prison (43a). Socrates staunchly refuses, not wanting to break the law of the state, despite the fact that it has wrongly sentenced him death (46b). Though he makes a strong case for the universal rule of law, he seems ultimately unable to reconcile the injustice that it has clearly caused him....

Though their stories are set over three thousand years apart, taking place around 1200BC after the siege of Troy and around 1930AD during the Great Depression respectively, there are a shocking number of similarities between the stories the Odyssey, and the film Oh Brother Where Art Thou. If these similarities seem too coincidental, the film even begins with an old-timey slide of a direct quote from Homer’s epic poem, simultaneously establishing such a direct connection and also alluding towards its modern take on the slapstick silent-film style....

Aristotle bases his philosophical program on the study of nature, and specifically the changes objects in nature are able to undergo. This is opposed to his metaphysics, which is only able to come afterward, as it broadly addresses all possible beings, and not just those found wholly in nature. We might at first seem definitively capable of studying these changes in natural things by comparison to the seemingly far more speculative metaphysical objects, which we do not find so clearly in the world all around us....

There is no question that throughout history and even onward in to the present day humanity has divided itself in to a number of different cultural groups. It’s no less contested that each culture in some varying manner shapes the moral beliefs, practices, and values of its followers. In the same sense people are informed as to what is right and wrong through the same system of cultural normalization. Although people of different cultures may have even very large differences in their moral values, the cultural relativist suggests that this should only be understood as inflexible differences between differing cultures....

We can not ignore the skeptical dream scenario, that holding that the only things which really exist are ourselves and our imagined experiences. However, although there are no grounds by which we may ever determine this is not actually the case, we can provide a much more reasonable explanation by assuming the existence of objects independent to us which cause our experiences, rather than that we are generating all of them ourselves....