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 ...

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 ...

Alexander Hooke finds hell & existentialist hope in prison. Hope helps keep us alive and anticipating the next sunrise with joy rather than gloom. It enlivens projects and maintains focus. Hope is ...

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 ...

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 ...

Willow Verkerk considers what Nietzsche has to teach us about love. What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose. Speculations about his sexuality ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...

Austen is justly celebrated as a literary icon both for her genius and for her role in inventing the modern novel. Her first novel, Northanger Abbey (by a quirk, not actually published until 1818, ...

Timothy J. Madigan thinks Kant’s duty-based ethics could approve of prostitution. ‘… to allow one’s person for profit to be used by another for the satisfaction of sexual desire, to make of oneself an ...

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 ...

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 ...

Simon Blackburn is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, a member of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group, a former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and currently a ...