Peter Benson deconstructs the moral intrigues of Dorian Gray. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year ...

Iain King derives a universal moral law from a moral field study. Welcome to Africa! I’m in the remote jungles of South Sudan, near the unmarked border with the Central African Republic (roughly 5 ...

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 ...

Will Bouwman on how Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides & Zeno established empiricism, maths & logic as dominant features of Western thinking. According to Aristotle, the first Greek ...

Peter Benson explains why Hegel was obsessed with the number three. One of the best known popularizers of philosophy in Britain is Bryan Magee. Many people will fondly recall his illuminating series ...

Michael Antony argues that the New Atheists miss the mark. “A wise man,” wrote Hume, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” This is a formulation of evidentialism – the view that a belief is ...

Stephen Faison cross-examines the idea of a social contract. According to classic social contract theory, originally elaborated by Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century, human beings begin ...

H. James Birx looks at Darwin’s profound influence on Nietzsche’s dynamic philosophy. The scientist Charles Darwin had awakened the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche from his dogmatic slumber by the ...

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 ...

Hegel’s philosophy of history is most lucidly set out in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, given at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828 and 1830. In his introduction to those ...

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 ...

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in ...