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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought. Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which ...

Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing. In the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...