Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

The story of Russell’s philosophical account of the evils of German politics starts with the chaotic jingoism of the First World War. Prior to 1914, German scholarship had been widely respected in ...

Does Sartre’s philosophy give us any clues about how we should live? Yes, says Jonathan Crowe – he showed us that we can’t avoid choosing. The early French existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre ...

John Greenbank searches history for answers to persistent questions. The history of philosophy must be understood as a series of serious intellectual and moral claims about fundamental issues. For ...

Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...

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 ...

Vincent di Norcia applies his mental powers to Darwin’s moral theory. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most ...

David P. Barash says, not necessarily. Ideas have consequences. Few people – and probably no philosophers – would disagree with this. It is also unarguably true that not all ideas are equally ...

Chris Wright ponders Plato’s masterplan. One of the purposes of Plato’s Republic is to put forth a conception of the ‘just state’. Plato describes how such a state would be organized, who would govern ...

Richard Joyce on what happens when falsehoods are too useful to throw out. The history of moral philosophy can seem a disappointing spectacle. Large tracts of it can be interpreted as thinkers taking ...

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 ...

Alan Brody reviews The Metaphysics of Mind by Anthony Kenny. The most famous theory in the philosophy of mind is René Descartes’ view that each human being consists of a mind (which is a non-physical, ...