Mike Austin listens to Bono while reading Kierkegaard, and discovers that they have the same soul. The death of his mother had a huge impact on him and on the substance of his writings. He became ...

Richard Rorty is perhaps the best-known living philosopher in the Pragmatic tradition, and one of the most talked-about thinkers of the present day. He is a philosophy professor at Stanford University ...

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 ...

The story of Russell’s philosophical account of the evils of German politics starts with the chaotic jingoism of the First World War. Prior to 1914, German scholarship had been widely respected in ...

This would have been a big year for Darwin, if he had been fit enough to survive this long. The intellectual fact of 2009 is that it’s Darwin’s bicentenary (February 12th), and the hundred and ...

Annina Lehmann argues that wearing lipstick is a choice which shows that though we’re influenced by society, we can still make decisions about who we want to be. Sit on a city train on a normal ...

The philosophical counseling movement started during the early Eighties in Europe and the US. It seemed to be a zeitgeist phenomenon: the time was ripe, and a number of people around the world who had ...

Willow Verkerk considers what Nietzsche has to teach us about love. What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose. Speculations about his sexuality ...

Mike Alder asks what is wrong with being charmingly illogical. Aseries of science/fantasy novels by Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague deCamp started in the nineteen forties, and were collected later in The ...

John Greenbank searches history for answers to persistent questions. The history of philosophy must be understood as a series of serious intellectual and moral claims about fundamental issues. For ...

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 ...

Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper. All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious ...