‘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 ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

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 ...

Omid Panahi finds that finding a solution is not the problem. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment first devised by the Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. In her paper titled ‘The ...

In his Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), Hegel argues that there are three ways of doing history. The first of these is original history. Original history refers to ...

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 ...

Chad Engelland philosophically analyses the experience of being at the seaside. At the beach, we soak up some sun, frolic in the surf, and swim with the waves – to name just a few of the activities ...

The following answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. Sorry if your answer doesn’t appear: we received enough to fill twelve pages… Why are we here? Do we serve a ...

Jeff Mason on Kierkegaard’s three forms of life: the ethical, the aesthetic and the religious. Why get up in the morning? Should we get up for ourselves, for others, or for the Christian God? If we ...

City, Liverpool John Moore, Swansea, Northampton ... once again university philosophy departments across Britain are closing or under threat. Peter Rickman makes the case for universities that educate ...

Ralph Blumenau on why things may not be what they seem to be. Before Kant, philosophers had divided propositions into two kinds, under the technical names of ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Propositions ...

Daniel Kaufman sees philosophy ailing as a guide for Western culture, and considers how it might be revived. Among the humanities, philosophy is particularly dependent on its place in the Academy.