50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)

Though an atheist, Ayer rejected the idea that one could even talk about atheism with meaning, because it was just as nonsensical to say “There is no God” as it was to say “God exists,” as neither statement could ever be verified.

Baudrillard calls this new world the “hyperreal” and one of its interesting qualities is that it obviates the need for the imaginary, since there is no distinction between what is reality and what is imagined. We are left with a world that is a “gigantic simulacrum” (a simulation or likeness), one that is “never exchanged for the real, but exchange

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Philosophers have spent centuries arguing about the relative weight between “subject” (I) and “object” (the world), but Baudrillard saw the debate as having long since become insignificant – the object had won hands down. A person today is not a project in selfhood, as many traditions of philosophy and theology have told us, but more like a machine

All of our choices, Epicurus says in his letter to Menoeceus, should be toward “the health of the body or the calm of the soul, since this is the goal of a happy life.”

We can wish for something, but to attain it we have to decide to take particular actions. Similarly, we can believe certain things, but it is action that forms our character.

As rational beings, our greatest happiness comes from choices that we arrive at through reason. We work out what is best for us in the long run, and in following that path happiness comes as a by-product.

Advertising is conventionally seen as superficial in relation to the actual things and products to which it refers, but in Baudrillard’s thinking advertising is the core of our civilization. The commodities to which it points are relatively valueless – what matters is our identification with the stories, signs, and imagery that front those commodit

The Medium Is the Massage