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 ...

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...

Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a ...

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 ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...

Kelvin McQueen asks whether minds could directly influence physical reality. It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem of explaining how subjective, conscious experience could arise out of ...

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 ...

City, Liverpool John Moore, Swansea, Northampton ... once again university philosophy departments across Britain are closing or under threat. Peter Rickman makes the case for universities that educate ...

Mark Conard reveals the metaphysical truths lurking under the rug in Tarantino’s cult classic. Nihilism is a term which describes the loss of value and meaning in people’s lives. When Nietzsche ...

Yahia Lababidi meditates on the aesthetics and ethics of two great contrarians. The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive ...

Duane Cady tells us why pacifism isn’t sitting back and letting the masters of war have their way. Pacifism rarely gets taken seriously due to a widespread cultural bias: ‘everybody knows’ that ...

Stuart Greenstreet on the abysmal failure of theories about crime and punishment. Prison doesn’t work. Theories about the punishment of lawbreakers fail in practice because they disregard the real ...