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 ...

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 ...

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence. Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of ...

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 ...

Know the name, can’t quite recall what he thought? John-Francis Phipps explains the surprising ideas of the philosopher of vitalism. Bergson’s name is not usually included on shortlists of the ...

Peter Saltzstein finds that Chaos Theory yields unexpected philosophical results. The future is not what it used to be. I mean, an intriguing implication of the branch of mathematics called chaos ...

Yahia Lababidi meditates on the aesthetics and ethics of two great contrarians. The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive ...

Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) regarded morality as indispensable to the survival of humanity, and he devoted considerable ...

Mark Daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas. Let us start by considering three points. First, medieval philosophy came from a period when philosophy was under attack: the proponents of ...

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 ...

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 ...