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 ...

Why do some physicists now believe that there are many parallel universes very like our own? And if there are, how will this help us build faster computers? Quantum mechanics was developed in the ...

Emrys Westacott asks a probing question. Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of ...

Fred Leavitt reveals how the whiteness of swans proves the blackness of ravens. Many scientific theories and laws are of the form “All A is B.” Two examples are “Water at sea level boils at 100 ...

Van Harvey on the metaphysical aspects of an anti-metaphysical philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche shared at least one fundamental concern with the religions and metaphysical systems that he so criticized ...

Jesse Prinz argues that the source of our moral inclinations is merely cultural. Suppose you have a moral disagreement with someone, for example, a disagreement about whether it is okay to live in a ...

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist. “This world,” mused Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to ...

Michael Rockler compares two ethics of statemanship for two American presidents. United States presidents, beginning with George Washington in his policy regarding the French Revolution, right up to ...

Imadaldin Al-Jubouri on the medieval Islamic philosopher who pioneered the scientific understanding of history. Some consider the Italian philosopher Vico (1668-1744) to have been the founder of ...

John Locke (1632-1704) and George Berkeley (1685-1753) never actually met, although both believed that all our knowledge originally comes from our senses. However, they had very different views about ...

Omid Panahi finds that finding a solution is not the problem. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment first devised by the Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. In her paper titled ‘The ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...