Yolanda De Iuliis looks at how Roman Mithraism incorporated Stoic philosophy. Mithraism’s adoption and integration of Stoic virtues is compelling and noteworthy. These virtues not only shaped the ...

Not so fast. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 CE) would say to all this noise: “Been there, done that.” The notion that rhetoric or speech-making is at the center of public life and therefore should ...

Massimo Pigliucci is moved by a 2,000 year old letter. The time is around 90 CE, and Plutarch of Chaeronea in Greece is travelling when news reaches him of the death of his two-year-old daughter ...

Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist. “This world,” mused Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Stephen Leach considers what Bertrand Russell thought about common sense & reality – and how the one does not necessarily show you the other. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) believed that reality is ...

Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle. The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Michael Faust reviews this film in the light of eternity. Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer ...