Terri Murray responds to an article in Issue 91 that argued that our moral dispositions should be improved by the use of drugs. “Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or ...

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 ...

Philip Goff discusses a thought-experiment about consciousness. For the last five hundred years or so physics has been doing extraordinarily well. More and more of our world has been captured in its ...

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 ...

Harvard philosopher Tu Wei-ming is the most famous advocate of the Confucian tradition outside China. Anja Steinbauer talked to him in Boston. When I first came to the States to study philosophy in ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks. The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searle’s Chinese Room, David Chalmers’ Philosophical ...

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 ...

David Rönnegard laments having to leave the party early.

John Locke (1632-1704) and George Berkeley (1685-1753) never actually met, although both believed that all our knowledge originally comes from our senses. However, they had very different views about ...

Ethicist and animal rights advocate Peter Singer has faced public outrage over his views on infanticide and euthanasia. Richard Taylor explains why he regards Singer as the most important thinker of ...

Stephen Ferguson asks whether mathematical objects are real. I work on the philosophy of mathematics – in fact, I’m just finishing off my PhD dissertation. When I meet people and they ask what I do, ...