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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Brent Silby asks, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy? The Simulated Universe Argument suggests that the universe we inhabit is an elaborate emulation of the real universe. Everything, ...

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, and founder and Director of Chicago’s Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. Angela Tan chatted with him ...

Ralph Blumenau tells us what great thinkers said about great music. Today some universities have courses in the Philosophy of Music. They study such questions as: What is the definition of music? What ...

Peter Benson ponders the construction and deconstruction of our traditional notions about gender. According to Jacques Derrida, a distinctive feature of all language is its ‘citationality’. By this he ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

Eva Cybulska dispells popular misconceptions about this controversial figure. “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Übermensch – a rope over an abyss.” For Nietzsche, the idea of Übermensch was ...

Angels, humans, the leaves on a tree; is each one unique or just an example of its kind? Peter Pesic explains why Leibniz thought even leaves are individuals. In the long debate on these issues, ...

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.

I admit that laughing out loud when I heard this joke about the famous blind and deaf writer was not my finest moment – as a woman or as a decent human being. As soon as I stopped laughing, I came to ...