This column is dedicated to rational discussion of moral and other issues. The underlying assumption is that claims need to be backed up by arguments. But every once in a while, a position seems so ...

John Greenbank searches history for answers to persistent questions. The history of philosophy must be understood as a series of serious intellectual and moral claims about fundamental issues. For ...

Angela Phillips is the winner of Philosophy Now’s 2019 Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. She gave this acceptance talk at Conway Hall in January. Stupidity is not about ...

Willow Verkerk considers what Nietzsche has to teach us about love. What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose. Speculations about his sexuality ...

Raymond Tallis on the true mystery of memory. Regular readers of this column will know that despite my background in neuroscience, I am not persuaded that brain activity is a sufficient explanation of ...

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been ...

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 ...

One of Vietnam’s leading academic philosophers Vu Tinh describes the role of philosophy in his country and in the world at large. The natural sciences and technology have developed rapidly and ...

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 ...

Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher. Etienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the English-speaking world through a footnote in his friend Michel de ...

Samuel Kaldas compares two views on the nature of animals and their implications for our moral responsibility towards them. “No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even ...

David Rönnegard laments having to leave the party early.