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- Intellectual Autonomy in the Age of Dogma: Lessons from Nietzsche

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Introduction In his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , Friedrich Nietzsche radically challenges conventional ideas of truth and knowledge, arguing that human cognition distorts reality through metaphor and language. He claims that what we call "truth" is not a reflection of an objective reality, but rather a set of metaphors that have become fixed over time through cultural repetition. This article will examine Nietzsche’s ideas on truth and knowledge, exploring how they invite both interpretation and misinterpretation. Nietzsche remains one of the most influential thinkers in philosophy, particularly in relation to the concepts of truth, language, and power. His works challenge the foundations of Western thought by questioning whether we can ever access “reality” as it truly is, or whether our understanding is always filtered through cognitive and linguistic constructs. His insights have influenced existentialism, post-structuralism, and contemporary critiqu...

The Art of Reasoning: A Peircean Critique of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Language and Knowledge

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Introduction Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense offers a radical critique of language and truth, arguing that human cognition distorts reality through metaphorical constructions. Nietzsche provocatively claims that what we call “truth” is nothing more than a “movable host of metaphors” ingrained through cultural repetition. For him, language is not a transparent medium that reflects the world, but rather a human invention that oversimplifies and falsifies our experience of reality. This skepticism challenges the very foundation of knowledge, suggesting that truth is a construct, not a discovery. However, this essay proposes a critique of Nietzsche’s views through the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, who offers a different perspective on the nature of language, cognition, and truth. Peirce developed a comprehensive theory of signs that includes icons, indices , and symbols —each playing a distinct role in how we understand the world. While ...