‘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 ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

Having to face new, foreign, or simply different ways of thought is not an exclusively 20th Century experience: “You cannot put charcoal and ice in the same container,” once declared an 12th Century ...

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 ...

Duane Cady tells us why pacifism isn’t sitting back and letting the masters of war have their way. Pacifism rarely gets taken seriously due to a widespread cultural bias: ‘everybody knows’ that ...

City, Liverpool John Moore, Swansea, Northampton ... once again university philosophy departments across Britain are closing or under threat. Peter Rickman makes the case for universities that educate ...

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 ...

Ian James Kidd takes a look at humanity through dark glasses. The condemnation of humankind is very topical these days. Given the global environmental crisis, the rise of far-right ideologies, ...

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 ...

Frederik Kaufman asks what is and is not discrimination. The concept of discrimination plays roughly the same role in public debate as the concept of terrorism. In just the same way as disliked ...

Sam Woolfe asks if pessimism is a proper response to life or a symptom of depression. If you have a pessimistic philosophical outlook on the world then it makes sense that you would also feel ...