“A disgrace… more awful than dualism” (Ted Honderich, Philosopher – A Kind of Life, 2001, pp.247, 278); “a dreaded relic” (Daniel C. Dennett, Brainchildren, 1998, p.65). These are just some of the ...

Michael Antony argues that the New Atheists miss the mark. “A wise man,” wrote Hume, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” This is a formulation of evidentialism – the view that a belief is ...

Austen is justly celebrated as a literary icon both for her genius and for her role in inventing the modern novel. Her first novel, Northanger Abbey (by a quirk, not actually published until 1818, ...

Generally for existentialists, one is not born anything: everything we are is the result of our choices, as we build ourselves out of our own resources and those which society gives us. We don ’t only ...

Nick Bostrom tells us a philosophical parable about death. Once upon a time the world was tyrannized by a great dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and was covered with thick ...

Gerard Casey breaks down Mill’s core principle. If a classic is a book that everybody thinks they’ve read but few actually have, then John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty is definitely a classic. Over ...

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 ...

Hans Lenk relates to different types of responsibility. In his The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), the well-known satirical writer Ambrose Bierce defined responsibility as: “a detachable burden easily ...

Katie Javanaud asks whether there is a contradiction at the heart of Buddhism. Two of the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism are firstly that the self is illusory, and secondly that we can achieve ...

Jeff Mason on Kierkegaard’s three forms of life: the ethical, the aesthetic and the religious. Why get up in the morning? Should we get up for ourselves, for others, or for the Christian God? If we ...

David White contemplates a life of sex and sermons. Those who know his name at all associate John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86) with the Oneida Community, an experiment in communal living in the tradition ...

Friedrich Nietzsche has been read and assessed differently by many commentators and students. Some consider that he was the first existentialist, putting forward ideas and arguments that were later ...