Massimo Pigliucci considers the usefulness of philosophy. Philosophy, as you probably know, means ‘love of wisdom’. However, if you wish to learn how to become wise I highly recommend you don’t walk ...

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought. Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing. In the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be ...

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 ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western ...

In his Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), Hegel argues that there are three ways of doing history. The first of these is original history. Original history refers to ...

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 ...

Peter Saltzstein finds that Chaos Theory yields unexpected philosophical results. The future is not what it used to be. I mean, an intriguing implication of the branch of mathematics called chaos ...

Laura Weed takes us on a tour of the mind/brain controversy. In the twentieth century philosophy of mind became one of the central areas of philosophy in the English-speaking world, and so it remains.

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...