The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. We ...

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 ...

Markus Gabriel one of the founders of New Realism, talks to Anja Steinbauer about why the world does not exist, and other curious metaphysical topics. I’m talking with Markus Gabriel, Professor of ...

Laura Purdy considers some of the problems associated with animal organ transfer. In January 2003, U.S. scientist Randall Prather announced that he had successfully cloned a miniature pig lacking the ...

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 ...

Barbara Hands considers whether it is ever right for the law to limit your freedom of choice and action, for your own good. Fred and Bob are a gay couple who have been together for 15 years. Fred is ...

Can gene-culture evolution, rather than philosophy, answer our deepest ethical questions? Torin Alter on moral values and the appliance of science. The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism ...

Abdelkader Aoudjit reports on which beleaguered positions are still held After the Science Wars. The widely accepted view according to which the goal of science is to explain how things really are has ...

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 ...

Ramsey McNabb introduces moral particularism. Usually, when someone is called a ‘person of principle’ it is meant as a compliment. For the most part, we take that phrase as applying to the ethical ...

Julia Nefsky on the curiously strong connections between logic and humour. What would you say if I asked you to describe humour? What type of ‘thing’ is it? Perhaps you’d say that humour is a form of ...

Eva Cybulska dispells popular misconceptions about this controversial figure. “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Übermensch – a rope over an abyss.” For Nietzsche, the idea of Übermensch was ...