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 ...

Patrick Cannon uses a popular setting to explain Kant’s metaphysics. It’s Friday night and you’re at the bar. It’s packed. You snake through the sea of bodies. “Ah! There’s a free spot!” exclaims your ...

Academician Abdusalam A. Guseinov on pacificism and the perspective of the infinite beginning. The idea of nonviolence entered into the cycle of Russian ethics on the wave of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ...

David White contemplates a life of sex and sermons. Those who know his name at all associate John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86) with the Oneida Community, an experiment in communal living in the tradition ...

Ramsey McNabb introduces moral particularism. Usually, when someone is called a ‘person of principle’ it is meant as a compliment. For the most part, we take that phrase as applying to the ethical ...

It is difficult not to begin with David Hume, as his assault on the self includes what must be one of the most famous passages in all philosophy: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I ...

What does make a musical performance authentic? What do we mean by authenticity anyway? Michael Graubart looks for some answers. Bach fugues on the clavichord or the piano? Handel arias with added ...

Kurt Keefner tells you why you can’t be only your brain. It always goes back to René Descartes. Descartes said that each of us consists of a non-physical mind inside a physical body. The mind, which ...

Steve Torrance asks if robots need minds to be moral producers or moral consumers. Robots present an interesting double picture. We can see them simply as our tools, as things we use. Alternatively we ...

Mikhail Epstein sees a bright future for metaphysics in the hi-tech age. “Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost ...

Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute. “I saw eternity the other night. Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” – Henry Vaughan Vaughan’s simile is an attempt to ...

Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess. This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus ...