Ray Liikanen overhears a modern-day Socratic dialogue. Setting: A park, where Socrates spots a man leafing through one of the three books he has on him. Socrates notes the titles, and since he’s ...

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 ...

Colin Radford considers the wonderful world of modern art. Every significant change in art provokes a reaction. Perhaps that’s a tautology, but that means it’s true. In 15th century Florence, Masaccio ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Pablo Cevallos Estarellas reviews the developments that caused professional to triumph over amateur philosophy in education, and proposes a way forward. If to do philosophy is to ask questions of a ...

Gordon Marino explains how we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing. There is a strong movement afoot calling for more ethics classes, workshops and review boards. The presumption is that our ...

Bertrand Russell argued that the time spent working by an average person should be drastically reduced, work being an overrated virtue. Paul Western believes that ‘idleness’ is still not valued highly ...

Anika Benkov uncovers a question that’s been left unanswered. This isn’t a story about sex. It’s not even really a story about Darwin. This is a story about one generation’s loss of philosophy, and ...