Oliver Waters asks, is retributive justice justified in a modern society? “When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements refer to as a ‘Roaring Rampage of Revenge’. I roared, and I rampaged, ...
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 ...
Richard Lawson shows how Karl Popper can help settle the climate debate. Policymakers worldwide face a major headache relating to energy strategy. On the one hand, most climate scientists are warning ...
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 ...
Roger Caldwell finds philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien. For over two decades I have written a good deal of poetry and poetry criticism. I have also in that period written on philosophy, and ...
Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) regarded morality as indispensable to the survival of humanity, and he devoted considerable ...
The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...
Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger. What is being referred to when we speak of ‘The Enlightenment’ is not always easy to pin down, but in broad terms, it can be considered as an ...
Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...
Stephen Leach considers what Bertrand Russell thought about common sense & reality – and how the one does not necessarily show you the other. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believed that reality is ...
Brent Silby asks, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy? The Simulated Universe Argument suggests that the universe we inhabit is an elaborate emulation of the real universe. Everything, ...