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 ...

Amy Pollard reads Plato’s Republic as a reform document. Imagine a gym with unisex locker rooms. Imagine a daycare center that your kids can never leave. Imagine a dating service that randomly matches ...

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 ...

Raymond Tallis thinks the deeply unthinkable, as hard as he can. Perhaps the most dramatic and possibly even the most influential thought in philosophy is Parmenides’ assertion that the universe is an ...

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 ...

John Capps argues that Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist purges helped positivism to triumph over pragmatism in American universities in the 1950’s. The McCarthy era still casts a long shadow over ...

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 ...

We think we know what common sense is, and whatever it is, that we have it. But some people don’t have much, and those who do would be hard-pressed to define it. Bishop Berkeley said in his ...

Ben G. Yacobi asks if it is possible to live authentically. We are told: “To thine own self be true!” But what do we mean if we say that somebody is an authentic person, or a very genuine person?