David Ashton finds that the Stoic view of anger needs updating. Stoics have a well-known aversion to strong emotions, but anger seems to fill them with a particular dread. Seneca, one of the ...

Oliver Waters asks, is retributive justice justified in a modern society? “When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a ‘Roaring Rampage of Revenge’. I roared, and I rampaged, ...

Arianna Marchetti reflects on the limits of political freedom. Freedom “is my right to have my own opinion, my own conscience. Many can perfectly live without freedom, as the freedom of having ...

Michael Allen Fox wonders whether life really is ‘a precious gift’. What is life worth? Questioning the value of our existence has the utmost significance, but no response seems likely to fully ...

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about ...

Robert Stern talks with AmirAli Maleki about philosophy in general, and Kant and Hegel in particular. Robert Stern FBA (1962-2024) was a British philosopher who served as a professor of philosophy at ...

David Howard on restoring balance to an unstable world. Is it still possible for us to live a good life while avoiding climate catastrophe? How could society be organised to create the conditions for ...

Massimo Pigliucci organizes his library. Have you ever read modern technical books in philosophy? If so, you might have noticed that, broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: treatises on a ...

Steve Stewart-Williams on the implications of evolutionary theory for ethics. “Morality is a collective illusion of the genes. We need to believe in morality, and so, thanks to our biology, we do ...

Peter Sjöstedt-H introduces Whitehead’s organic awareness of reality. The philosophy of organism is the name of the metaphysics of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Born in ...

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 ...

Raymond Tallis on the true mystery of memory. Regular readers of this column will know that despite my background in neuroscience, I am not persuaded that brain activity is a sufficient explanation of ...