Terraforming is the artificial transformation of other planets into places suitable for human habitation. A good thing, surely? Paul York argues that terraforming isn’t as ethically straightforward as ...

Raymond Tallis on maths’ unreasonable effectiveness. The belief that mathematics is the surest path to the truth about the universe because the latter is at bottom mathematical has been very ...

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 ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...

Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...

Alfred Geier says it’s not about the state of the state. The Republic is Plato’s most famous dialogue, contains many of his best-known arguments and is one of the great classics of world literature.

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 ...

Stuart Greenstreet isn’t quite sure how long a metre is. Are you? In the Academy of Science, located in a suburb of Paris, a slim bar of platinum-iridium alloy is kept in its sturdy case in a ...

Alan Haworth on Karl Popper, his vision of a pragmatic, liberal society, and his assessment of its philosophical enemies. It is now one hundred years since the birth of Karl Popper, and almost sixty ...

Tim Wilkinson on the physics & philosophy of parallel universes. In his 1895 essay Is Life Worth Living? the American philosopher William James wrote, “Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds ...

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 ...

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 ...