Yahia Lababidi meditates on the aesthetics and ethics of two great contrarians. The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

Shakespeare never met Wittgenstein, Russell, or Ryle, and one wonders what a conversation between them would have been like. “What’s in a name, you ask?” Wittgenstein might answer “A riddle of symbols ...

Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing. In the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be ...

Sally Scholz traces the major currents of Simone de Beauvoir’s main work. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was one of the twentieth century’s leading intellectuals, and certainly its most famous ...

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...

Ralph Blumenau on why things may not be what they seem to be. Before Kant, philosophers had divided propositions into two kinds, under the technical names of ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Propositions ...

Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...

Terri Murray tells us about a Hollywood hero beyond good and evil. If Hollywood genre movies can be depended upon to deliver one thing, it is a good hero pitted against an evil foe. Simplistic though ...

In his Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), Hegel argues that there are three ways of doing history. The first of these is original history. Original history refers to ...

Tim Wilkinson on the physics & philosophy of parallel universes. In his 1895 essay Is Life Worth Living? the American philosopher William James wrote, “Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds ...