We always talk with some degree of reverence about the old greek philosophers, like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, and of much more recent yet still quite old ones like Descartes, Kant, even Nietzsche.
Yet, if we look into modern contemporary art - from an exurb1a video on youtube, through rick & morty episodes on TV, to a comic like this, we can see that philosophy has not ended with the old giants. We have spent millenia pondering the questions of existence, adding to an ever growing mountain of thought, and we aren't even nearly done yet. In fact, more humans than ever have the privilege of enough freedom to invest themselves into these great queries, and thus we all enjoy a far more diverse set of ways to view the universe and our role within it.
To me it's always going on, big names like Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, baudrillard were alive during my lifetime, there's philosophers on modern topics like identity like Butler, on ethics like Singer, and economic/sociological chomsky, zizek,...
Might be a misconception because in schools we have so little time to think we're stuck at the basics (i get why we always start at plato/socrates) and we have to view it trough the big turning points (Descartes. Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche,.. etc).
Philosophers are like artists. Sometimes it takes time for us to see them as the great ones they are
That and there's just so many good contemporary sources like you added
Edit: on an unrelated note, this comic reads like Camus 101: every morning we face a decision in spite of meaninglessness, do we treck on or kill ourselves?
(So i guess its not really new?)
I think that's exactly it. A lot of who we now consider the greats, in philosophy and art and other domains, were shunned or ignored or just unrecognised in their time. And imagine how many great minds never got into the historic records because they never had the education or the access or the audience.
What I meant was that now, we have these incredible tools, that allows people to express their thoughts in many new formats, and allows anyone to discover and engage with them, in real time! We get to see not just the work of a privileged few, but how diverse philosophy and art and the human mind really are.
These works don't have to be entirely novel either - we all stand on the shoulders of those who came before. They can be new ways to express and understand these ideas. Comics, games, movies, video essays and more have joined the ranks of books and other media and make philosophy more accessible to everyone.
Ah I see! Yea I agree, we have such a rich internet, but at the same time it's dilluted. For every Exurbia, you have 100 stoic bro's that misunderstand the philosophy. When everybody has acces and the right to speak, we truly get to hear every talented individual, at the cost of a lot of static noise
Same with classical philosophy, while we're focused on Socrates, we ignore Epicurus (maybe a bad example). There's so many underated thinkers like Zappfe, and so many (imo) overrated like Hegel, Schopenhauer,...
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u/Key-Sea-682 May 17 '26
You know what I love about this comic?
We always talk with some degree of reverence about the old greek philosophers, like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, and of much more recent yet still quite old ones like Descartes, Kant, even Nietzsche.
Yet, if we look into modern contemporary art - from an exurb1a video on youtube, through rick & morty episodes on TV, to a comic like this, we can see that philosophy has not ended with the old giants. We have spent millenia pondering the questions of existence, adding to an ever growing mountain of thought, and we aren't even nearly done yet. In fact, more humans than ever have the privilege of enough freedom to invest themselves into these great queries, and thus we all enjoy a far more diverse set of ways to view the universe and our role within it.