Explore philosophy through its most famous quotes! Today: Philosopher and Theologian Albert Schweitzer on the Reverence for Life. (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: Immanuel Kant on how to treat human beings. (more...)

Altogether this is the most comprehensive account of how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ came to attain its current ubiquity that has yet been written. (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...)

Christopher Hamilton’s “Rapture” is a very pleasant, well-written, intelligent, and inspiring essay on the many meanings of human lives. (more...)

A timeline of Aristotle’s life shown over a map of ancient Greece. (more...)

Computers have a long history of being associated with evilness. Machine minds without emotions suggest cruelty, unflinching execution of inhuman orders. (more...)

Being right is a relative thing. No one illustrates this better than today’s celebrant: Galileo’s telescope, presented to the world on August 25, 1609. (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 rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking. (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...)

We’ve heard it all our lives — size matters and bigger is better. But David Velleman wants you to believe that shape can matter more! (more...)

Is abortion ethical? Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson created one of the most well-known thought experiments in modern ethics. In her 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion,” she presents the thought experiment of the unconscious violinist. (more...)

Hedonism is the thesis that happiness and pleasure are the same. But is that true? Does the enjoyment of pleasures like good food, chocolate, sex and a myriad other things that we consume everyday — do these things really make us happier? (more...)

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

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

For Erich Fromm, true activity means to fully use one’s talents in order to grow as a person. The mere display of business is not a sign of productive work. (more...)

Epicurus (341-270 BC) is often seen as an advocate of a luxurious life, rich in good food and other pleasures. This is incorrect. (more...)

Is there a difference between the way we perceive happiness and life in the West in comparison with “Eastern” cultures? We compare Erich Fromm and Lin Yutang. (more...)

Such examples point to the possibility of a non-ego-based ethics. They suggest that moral action does not require deliberation or even a sense of being a separate self. (more...)

Who was Aristotle, what did he write, and why does a thinker from the fourth century BCE still shape how we think about logic, nature, happiness and the good life? (more...)

Twenty-four centuries before the periodic table, Democritus of Abdera argued that everything – rocks, souls, colours, gods – is made of tiny uncuttable particles moving in empty space. He was ignored by Plato, refuted by Aristotle, and vindicated by modern science. This is who he was, what he taught, and why his ideas still unsettle us. (more...)

Who was Heraclitus, what did he mean by saying that everything flows, and why has this obscure aristocrat from Ephesus fascinated thinkers from Plato to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger? (more...)

Is your mind the same thing as your brain? Something separate from it? A pattern of behaviour, a kind of software, or an illusion? This guide walks through the main theories of mind – dualism, behaviourism, identity theory, functionalism, epiphenomenalism, eliminativism and more – with an example for each showing what it explains well and where it struggles. (more...)

Who was Plato, what did he write, and why does a thinker who died almost 2,400 years ago still shape how we think about knowledge, justice, love and the good life? (more...)