Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes! Today: Immanuel Kant on how to treat human beings. (more...)

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: Socrates on knowing that you know nothing. (more...)

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

James Romm (2026). Since You’re Mortal…: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. W.W. Norton and Company. 176 pages. Get it here: Amazon US, publisher’s website. (more...)

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

Did you know that singer Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of the famous physicist Max Born, one of the two people who claimed to have discovered the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics? (more...)

The French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen is a remarkable document, not only because its main ideas found their way into many national constitutions and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (more...)

Pessimism today has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, even a cursory glance at the world reveals a depressing abundance of dreadful events, tendencies, and phenomena. (more...)

Hermits have always lived apart from the societies of their times. But do they have the secret key to happiness? (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...)

Robert Rodriguez is the author of The Book of Hermits and founder and editor of the website Hermitary. In this interview, he talks to us about the history of eremitism and the nature of hermit life. (more...)

Who does not know that feeling when a discussion becomes unfair, as if sabotaged? You make a good point, but suddenly the person you’re talking to says something odd, absurd or irrelevant. (more...)

There is a possible archetype here of the silent, rejected saint, the unthanked helper, the monk in exile. (more...)

Deontological ethics is about actions that must be performed (or must not be performed) because the actions themselves are intrinsically good or bad. (more...)

What are the moral rules for war, how can wars be justified and are we obliged to help a country that has been attacked? Just War Theory applied to the current conflict in the Ukraine. (more...)

Ethics is the study of how we ought to behave, and why. There are many different theories of ethics, which we briefly discuss in this article. (more...)

If prison is justified because it protects society, rehabilitates offenders, deters future crime, and/or restores justice, then it must ultimately be judged by whether it accomplishes those ends. (more...)

One of his best known concepts of Marxism is the idea of “alienation” that describes how human beings get estranged from their work. (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...)

Erich Fromm claims that freedom itself can sometimes be the cause of fear and anxiety, forcing us to find ways to “escape from freedom.” Authoritarianism, destructiveness and automaton conformity are three ways how we try to cope with the freedom we fear. (more...)

Why AI agrees with us too much — how Asimov’s telepathic robot predicted sycophancy, and why we must make our machines argue back. (more...)

What exactly did Gandhi mean by nonviolence, where did the idea come from in Hindu thought, how was it meant to work as a political method, and how does it compare with Jesus, Tolstoy, Thoreau, King and the civil resistance movements of the twentieth century? (more...)

A couple who chose eternal youth must decide whether to grow old again in order to have a child. A short story about love, mortality, and the price of a family. (more...)

Promoting human-made art. This week, and artwork by Rossella Vingelli. (more...)

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche, what did he write, and what did he mean by the death of God, master and slave morality, the will to power, the Übermensch and eternal recurrence? A guide to his life, works, ideas and lasting relevance. (more...)

What is bad faith (mauvaise foi) in Sartre’s philosophy? Sartre’s examples of the waiter and the woman on a date explained, and how bad faith compares to Heidegger’s authenticity, Nietzsche’s herd morality and Fromm’s escape from freedom. (more...)