‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about ...

Ignacio Gonzalez-Martinez has a flash of inspiration about the role metaphors play in creative thought. The equivalence between Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s distinct formulations of ...

There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified in lying to their children. The first is one many philosophy students learn about when they study what’s known as the ethics of ...

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 ...

Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western ...

Jung also suggested that Zarathustra manifests a second personality for Nietzsche, which was perhaps awaiting an opportunity to be expressed. This reading is supported by Nietzsche’s claim that during ...

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 ...

Phil Badger tackles the famous ‘Trolley Problem’ of ethics. So-called ‘Trolley Problems’, in which we are confronted by tortuously difficult ethical dilemmas, have become part of the stock-in-trade of ...

Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest. Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote ...

Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are. If a train continues on its current course, it will kill a workcrew of five down the track. However, a signalman is standing by a switch that can ...

Michael Philips on the shaky foundations of the most popular philosophical theory of modern times. Most academic philosophers these days will tell you, without hesitation, that they are materialists.