Having to face new, foreign, or simply different ways of thought is not an exclusively 20th Century experience: “You cannot put charcoal and ice in the same container,” once declared an 12th Century ...

If God is such a nice guy, why is there so much misery and suffering in the world? Kola Abimbola examines an ancient problem. One of the principal challenges to the ...

Phil Badger tries to make sense of a tangle of pride, identity and metaphysics. “If you believe yourself a citizen of the world then you are a citizen of nowhere.” UK Prime Minister Theresa May, ...

Raymond Tallis on the natural philosophy of the caress. It’s gripping stuff! We humans are unique and cannot be fully explained in biological terms. So, at least, I have argued in several books, ...

Van Harvey says it is possible to live meaningfully without a higher purpose. “Or again we could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except ...

Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment’s leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace. The newspaper Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant ...

Vincent Di Norcia theorizes how morality is generated by how the brain works. “The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” Damasio does ...

Fred Leavitt argues that our most cherished beliefs are probably wrong. Imagine that you’ve developed a new lie detector test and recruit a thousand people to try to beat it. You give them a series of ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Poet, playwright, scientist. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Philosopher. Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner: Chemist. It is 1829, and we are in the Faculty Club of the University ...

Let us begin by interpreting the ideal of liberty as a negative ideal in the manner favored by libertarians. So understood, liberty is the absence of interference by other people from doing what one ...

Dane Gordon on the friends of Epicurus. Epicureanism may be distinguished as a philosophy in two somewhat lamentable ways. It has possibly been vilified more than any other, a practice which began ...

Mark Coffey puts forward five reasons to love and five reasons to loathe the man who has been called “the most influential living philosopher”. Born in Australia in 1946, Peter Singer studied at the ...