A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Jeremy Bentham on the suffering of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (more...)

Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes. Today: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: “It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul…” (more...)

Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes! Today: Philosopher and Theologian Albert Schweitzer on the Reverence for Life. (more...)

Review of Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020, by Prof. Robert Zaborowski. (more...)

Hell is utterly impossible to put down just because of the sheer force of its language… (more...)

Peter Cave’s “How to Think Like a Philosopher” is a very enjoyable introduction into Western philosophy. Light, conversational, entertaining and intellectually stimulating. (more...)

Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean that we won’t pay over the odds for an analogue version. (more...)

Can artificial intelligence discover new laws of physics? Possibly. An article in Technology Review suggests that data from a swinging pendulum experiment allowed a neural network to discover some of the laws of motion. (more...)

Philosophy starts by questioning what the other sciences presuppose, the assumptions of all activity, cognition, and knowledge as a whole. (more...)

Tom Neale spent a total of fourteen years alone on a little island in the Suwarrow Atoll in the South Pacific, where he found peace and happiness in solitude. We have a look at this extraordinary life. (more...)

A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life. (more...)

The Dao De Jing is often not so different from other philosophies of its time. Acting according to nature, virtue as a skill, and the Daoist praise of humility are reminiscent of similar passages in the works of Stoics, Epicureans and Aristotle. (more...)

Hedonists believe that pleasure is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. If that’s true, why are so many hedonists into BDSM? (more...)

Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Retributivism is the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others. (more...)

Did the ancient Greeks really believe all those myths? We find it hard to imagine that people trusted the Oracle of Delphi with important decisions or prayed to such a horny and mischievous god as Zeus! (more...)

Are the people who perform evil acts ordinary or extraordinary? Just like other people or exceptional people? (more...)

Ethical arguments against veganism are examined and refuted. (more...)

What is meant is a form of respect that is a condition, one might say a conceptual precursor, to love proper. (more...)

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was a British philosopher, primarily concerned with the nature of the mind and the role of philosophy in the world. (more...)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) was a celebrated Roman writer, public speaker and philosopher and is today seen (alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) as one of the three greatest ancient Stoics. (more...)

In 1935, a bad trip triggered Jean-Paul Sartre’s deep-rooted fear of sea creatures. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by crabs and lobsters. (more...)

Every so often, a student comes to tell me they’re planning to step away from studying for a while. They want to go out into the world, they say — to gain some real experience. (more...)

Plato presents Socrates' skepticism toward the written word, and the limits of what can be derived through the process of reading, in the Phaedrus. (more...)

An interesting idea and a great table of contents, but the execution is unclear about who the ideal reader is — and will really satisfy nobody. (more...)

Ethical AI is less about building machines with moral status and more about building institutions with moral stamina. (more...)

Feeling pain for pain may be the ethical superpower nature and evolution gave us, but is it useful enough? (more...)

Why does 2+2=4…? The answer may not be as simple as one thinks. (more...)