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 ...

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 ...

Stephen Anderson sternly judges a cause célèbre. There was a time – some years ago – when to profess disbelief in a Supreme Being could be hazardous to one’s health. You could get hacked to pieces ...

In the first of our ‘Overview’ series, Mark Daniels describes the latest work on the earliest philosophers. Ancient Philosophy is the name given to early Greek philosophy starting with the inaugural ...

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 ...

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 ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...

Peter Benson ponders the construction and deconstruction of our traditional notions about gender. According to Jacques Derrida, a distinctive feature of all language is its ‘citationality’. By this he ...

Richard Garner says it’s about time we got rid of it. Free thinkers and skeptics throughout history have entertained the suspicion that morality is a mistake, a scam, a fiction that we make up; but ...

Benjamin Kerstein explores an ancient faultline in Western thinking and modern culture by comparing the philosophies of Epicurus and Job. A major strand of philosophy has held that an essential ...

What is it to be rational? An individual appears to be rational, rational being his actions. But what does it mean to act in a rational way? Let us turn to the notion of rationality as a ...

Alfred Geier says it’s not about the state of the state. The Republic is Plato’s most famous dialogue, contains many of his best-known arguments and is one of the great classics of world literature.