‘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 ...

Ignacio Gonzalez-Martinez has a flash of inspiration about the role metaphors play in creative thought. The equivalence between Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s distinct formulations of ...

There are a couple of solid reasons to doubt that parents are justified in lying to their children. The first is one many philosophy students learn about when they study what’s known as the ethics of ...

Samuel Kaldas compares two views on the nature of animals and their implications for our moral responsibility towards them. “No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even ...

The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...

Jung also suggested that Zarathustra manifests a second personality for Nietzsche, which was perhaps awaiting an opportunity to be expressed. This reading is supported by Nietzsche’s claim that during ...

Wendell Wallach tells us what the basic problems are. If a train continues on its current course, it will kill a workcrew of five down the track. However, a signalman is standing by a switch that can ...

Stephen Doty says the scientist was a philosopher, whether he liked it or not. Scientists seem ever the punching bags. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin – all were attacked. Rarely do scientists strike back ...

Phil Badger tackles the famous ‘Trolley Problem’ of ethics. So-called ‘Trolley Problems’, in which we are confronted by tortuously difficult ethical dilemmas, have become part of the stock-in-trade of ...

Michael Philips on the shaky foundations of the most popular philosophical theory of modern times. Most academic philosophers these days will tell you, without hesitation, that they are materialists.

Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest. Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote ...

Why do some physicists now believe that there are many parallel universes very like our own? And if there are, how will this help us build faster computers? Quantum mechanics was developed in the ...