There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified in lying to their children. The first is one many philosophy students learn about when they study what’s known as the ethics of ...

Michael Philips on the shaky foundations of the most popular philosophical theory of modern times. Most academic philosophers these days will tell you, without hesitation, that they are materialists.

The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...

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 ...

Terri Murray says that Jean-Paul Sartre was simply wrong about gay people and self-deception. Bad faith is Sartre’s conception of self-deception. Bad faith arises out of the human predicament – that ...

Eugene Earnshaw saves Western philosophy. It was a few years ago that I solved the biggest problem in philosophy. I was teaching undergraduates, and I wanted to blow their minds a little, tear down ...

Albert Shansky believes many of Russell’s opinions on religion are surprisingly in tune with those of the Buddhists. Those familiar with Bertrand Russell (1872- 1970) will know that he had opinions on ...

Eric Walther introduces the infamous iconoclast. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844, fell silent in 1889, and died eleven years later, was the first great philosopher of the twentieth century.

The esoteric nature of most theories of art prevent them from being absorbed and understood by the art-going public, who on the whole have little interest in philosophy. Many merely desire a pleasant ...

Noson Yanofsky tells us how to deal with contradictions and the limitations of reason that arise from them. We all have conflicting desires. We want to get promoted, but don’t want to work too hard.

Samuel Kaldas compares two views on the nature of animals and their implications for our moral responsibility towards them. “No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even ...

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 ...