Dave Hangman on a crucial lawsuit taking place the day after tomorrow. “Mrs Portman, we regret to notify you that our company will not be paying the sum insured for your husband’s death,” the suited ...

Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from. There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific ...

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 ...

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 ...

Omid Panahi finds that finding a solution is not the problem. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment first devised by the Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. In her paper titled ‘The ...

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 ...

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 ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Scott Remer thinks we arendt happy without a community and considers the complete reconstruction of the modern world to be well worth weil. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah ...

Ian Church queries the influence the media has on our perception of evil. Over the past fifty years, the problem of evil – the problem that the amount or kind of evil or suffering in this world counts ...

Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher. Etienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the English-speaking world through a footnote in his friend Michel de ...

Sam Woolfe asks if pessimism is a proper response to life or a symptom of depression. If you have a pessimistic philosophical outlook on the world then it makes sense that you would also feel ...