Paul Doolan attends to our culture of attention demanding. ‘Listen’ is composed of the same letters as ‘silent’. Listening to another person means falling silent while the other speaks, opening ...

The following answers to this artful question each win a random book. Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more ...

Jim Mepham quests with philosophers to discover what makes a life good. I have attended a number of funerals recently and it has got me thinking. Imagine after you’ve died, your loved ones are sitting ...

Patrick Testa on the extraordinary hope offered by Viktor Frankl. Psychiatric illnesses are on the rise around the world, weighing heavily on health systems already presenting barriers to access.

Rogério Severo looks at the brain to see the world anew. It seems there was a time when metaphysicians were all of a single species. Now they appear to make up at least two. Of the newer kind is the ...

Ben G. Yacobi asks if it is possible to live authentically. We are told: “To thine own self be true!” But what do we mean if we say that somebody is an authentic person, or a very genuine person?

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 ...

Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a ...

Farah Abdessamad wonders if it is a function of responsibility. One Saturday late morning I came across the loud brunch crowd around Gramercy in New York. After the eerily empty streets of last year, ...

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 ...

Terri Murray tells us about a Hollywood hero beyond good and evil. If Hollywood genre movies can be depended upon to deliver one thing, it is a good hero pitted against an evil foe. Simplistic though ...

Raymond Tallis dreams up a flight of philosophical fancy. The story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly must be one of the best known anecdotes in the philosophical literature. It is also, for me at any ...