Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

Mark Jago looks at Wittgenstein’s first theory of language, in the Tractatus. One of the conclusions of this theory is that the theory in the Tractatus is nonsense… In this article I am going to ...

Ralph Blumenau tells us what great thinkers said about great music. Today some universities have courses in the Philosophy of Music. They study such questions as: What is the definition of music? What ...

Raymond Tallis takes us from A to Zzzzz. The column you’re reading is at least in part the result of an accident – a happy one, I hasten to add. A few weeks ago, I was sitting on a panel with the ...

Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...

Abdelkader Aoudjit reviews a book of essays by Martha Nussbaum. This book is a collection of fourteen essays Martha Nussbaum, a professor of Classics and philosophy at Cornell University, has written ...

Richard Baron tries to be good in government. This article considers some of the ethical questions that arise in the conduct of government, in the light of two leading approaches to ethics. The two ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

Andrew Hussey on the death of a turbulent thinker. All followers of pop culture will know that 1994 was a good year for death: not on a par with 1969-70 (Jim, Jim, Janis), but epochal enough as the ...

Charles Taylor is one of the world’s leading living philosophers. Chris Bloor talks to him about philosophy and society. Charles Taylor’s intellectual journey took him from studying at McGill ...

Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger. What is being referred to when we speak of ‘The Enlightenment’ is not always easy to pin down, but in broad terms, it can be considered as an ...

After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists. Philosophers who aspire to describe reality without resort to myth, too often remain in thrall to the myth of ...