Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention. The idea of a cosmic purpose is one which many of us are familiar with from religion. What happens in this world, so the story goes, is ...

Dave Hangman on a crucial lawsuit taking place the day after tomorrow. “Mrs Portman, we regret to notify you that our company will not be paying the sum insured for your husband’s death,” the suited ...

Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from. There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific ...

Having to face new, foreign, or simply different ways of thought is not an exclusively 20th Century experience: “You cannot put charcoal and ice in the same container,” once declared an 12th Century ...

Shakespeare never met Wittgenstein, Russell, or Ryle, and one wonders what a conversation between them would have been like. “What’s in a name, you ask?” Wittgenstein might answer “A riddle of symbols ...

Ian Church queries the influence the media has on our perception of evil. Over the past fifty years, the problem of evil – the problem that the amount or kind of evil or suffering in this world counts ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter and Director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. He was recently elected President of the Philosophy of ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...

The following philosophical forecasts of our fate each win an unforeseeable book. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human progress has been unprecedented in its sheer speed and scale.

Peter Saltzstein finds that Chaos Theory yields unexpected philosophical results. The future is not what it used to be. I mean, an intriguing implication of the branch of mathematics called chaos ...