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 ...

Christina Aziz asks whether metanarratives still matter, and if so, how. In reaction to the religion, tradition and romanticism of earlier eras, ‘modernism’ was the name given to the broad movement of ...

Mark Daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas. Let us start by considering three points. First, medieval philosophy came from a period when philosophy was under attack: the proponents of ...

Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper. All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious ...

David Glass and Mark McCartney say Ockham’s razor doesn’t cut it with God. The idea that science has explained God away is very popular. The suggestion is that as science explains more and more about ...

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 ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has had a run-away success with The Black Swan, a book about surprise run-away successes. Constantine Sandis talks with him about knowledge and scepticism. As I find myself in ...

Can gene-culture evolution, rather than philosophy, answer our deepest ethical questions? Torin Alter on moral values and the appliance of science. The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism ...

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 ...

Richard Kamber considers the possibility of changing destiny. The eeriest episode in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) is the visit to Ebenezer Scrooge of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

What is it to be rational? An individual appears to be rational, rational being his actions. But what does it mean to act in a rational way? Let us turn to the notion of rationality as a ...

Some feminists say women should forget old-fashioned ethical rules and focus on developing positive aspects of their characters. Not so, says Sarah Conly. Clearly, virtue ethics’ emphasis on the ...