If God is such a nice guy, why is there so much misery and suffering in the world? Kola Abimbola examines an ancient problem. One of the principal challenges to the ...

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 ...

Robert Griffiths argues that humanist ethics has significant limitations. There are many people who do not believe in gods in any sense. Some are fervent atheists, but there are also very uninterested ...

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 ...

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 ...

James Sirois gives us a strong warning about overusing the net. The internet has become so all-pervading that even the word seems a little old-fashioned now. No-one really uses it much anymore. We ask ...

Welcome to the 4th Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. I’m delighted to say that we’re giving this year’s award to Professor Noam Chomsky. Stupidity comes in many ...

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 ...

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 ...

Raymond Tallis dreams up a flight of philosophical fancy. The story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly must be one of the best known anecdotes in the philosophical literature. It is also, for me at any ...

Daniel Kaufman sees philosophy ailing as a guide for Western culture, and considers how it might be revived. Among the humanities, philosophy is particularly dependent on its place in the Academy.

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 ...