Rob Gilbert says don’t just live in the now. Take the time to smell the roses, poets tell us. When the past is full of regrets and the future evokes anxiety, it might seem plausible that the present ...

Christina Aziz asks whether metanarratives still matter, and if so, how. In reaction to the religion, tradition and romanticism of earlier eras, ‘modernism’ was the name given to the broad movement of ...

Andy Owen explains what Aristotle was tolkien about. “Without friends no one would want to live, even if they had all other worldly things.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII In my early ...

Roger Caldwell responds to an analysis of Nietzsche’s morality. For many, Nietzsche and morality make an unlikely conjunction. Certainly, for all his challenging views – or perhaps because they proved ...

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western ...

William Rowe is a professor of philosophy at Purdue University. Though an atheist, he spends much of his working life thinking about God. Nick Trakakis recently chatted with him about God and evil and ...

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been ...

Alan Haworth on Karl Popper, his vision of a pragmatic, liberal society, and his assessment of its philosophical enemies. It is now one hundred years since the birth of Karl Popper, and almost sixty ...

Brian Breeze takes time to think. Everyone knows what time is: don’t they? But perhaps, when we look more closely, we will find that our initial confidence is not entirely justified. St. Augustine ...

Kai Hammermeister on the beauty business. Aesthetics is the philosophical investigation of art and the theory of beauty and opposite phenomena, like the ugly, the comical, the ironic, the grotesque ...

Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper. All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious ...

Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...