Michael Philips on truth and the Correspondence Theory. Most Americans believe that Osama bin Laden ordered the attack on the World Trade Center. Some Muslims believe the Israelis were behind it. Many ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Poet, playwright, scientist. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Philosopher. Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner: Chemist. It is 1829, and we are in the Faculty Club of the University ...

Matt Qvortrup explains how the Enlightenment’s leading philosopher went looking for a bit of peace. The newspaper Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen was slightly sarcastic when it wrote about Immanuel Kant ...

Van Harvey says it is possible to live meaningfully without a higher purpose. “Or again we could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except ...

Vincent Di Norcia theorizes how morality is generated by how the brain works. “The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” Damasio does ...

Biology and neuropsychology tell us the brain is a highly complex physical object, which in some ways resembles a computer in its operating principles. There are ‘circuits’ of neurons (brain cells) ...

Ray Liikanen overhears a modern-day Socratic dialogue. Setting: A park, where Socrates spots a man leafing through one of the three books he has on him. Socrates notes the titles, and since he’s ...

Fred Leavitt argues that our most cherished beliefs are probably wrong. Imagine that you’ve developed a new lie detector test and recruit a thousand people to try to beat it. You give them a series of ...

Colin Radford considers the wonderful world of modern art. Every significant change in art provokes a reaction. Perhaps that’s a tautology, but that means it’s true. In 15th century Florence, Masaccio ...

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 ...

Dane Gordon on the friends of Epicurus. Epicureanism may be distinguished as a philosophy in two somewhat lamentable ways. It has possibly been vilified more than any other, a practice which began ...

Raymond Tallis on the natural philosophy of the caress. It’s gripping stuff! We humans are unique and cannot be fully explained in biological terms. So, at least, I have argued in several books, ...