Rob Gilbert says don’t just live in the now. Take the time to smell the roses, poets tell us. When the past is full of regrets and the future evokes anxiety, it might seem plausible that the present ...

Andy Owen explains what Aristotle was tolkien about. “Without friends no one would want to live, even if they had all other worldly things.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII In my early ...

Barbara Hands considers whether it is ever right for the law to limit your freedom of choice and action, for your own good. Fred and Bob are a gay couple who have been together for 15 years. Fred is ...

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 ...

Eva Cybulska dispells popular misconceptions about this controversial figure. “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Übermensch – a rope over an abyss.” For Nietzsche, the idea of Übermensch was ...

Michael Faust reviews this film in the light of eternity. Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer ...

Phil Badger guides us through the varieties of liberalism, historical and philosophical. The big ideas of political philosophy are often hard to get clear in our minds, and there is no better example ...

Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...

Peter Flegel highlights possible connections between early Greek philosophy and the ideas of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Just over a year ago an eager team of archaeologists scoured through the ...

John Holroyd negotiates a middle way between these two much-lauded figures. Richard Dawkins makes so many claims in The God Delusion (2009) that I have decided to select just two for consideration.

Hegel’s philosophy of history is most lucidly set out in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, given at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828 and 1830. In his introduction to those ...

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.