Dave Hangman on a crucial lawsuit taking place the day after tomorrow. “Mrs Portman, we regret to notify you that our company will not be paying the sum insured for your husband’s death,” the suited ...

Raymond Tallis argues intently against universal intention. The idea of a cosmic purpose is one which many of us are familiar with from religion. What happens in this world, so the story goes, is ...

Raymond Tallis wonders what the world is made from. There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific ...

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 ...

This seems to leave an awful lot out. There is rather more to life than this alphabetically and chronologically ordered trio of biological events; more to our patch of living daylight than the ...

Ralph Blumenau reviews Bryan Magee’s philosophical autobiography. Confessions can be of two kinds: confessions of faith and confessions of failure. Bryan Magee’s vividly written intellectual ...

Brian D. Earp explains how chemical enhancement could save your marriage. What do you do when your marriage lasts less than two months? That was the predicament faced by Natasha Nelson, a ...

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western ...

Not as much as some people think, says Phil Badger. What is being referred to when we speak of ‘The Enlightenment’ is not always easy to pin down, but in broad terms, it can be considered as an ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci takes a dose of it. I’m a scientist by original training, so I tend not to believe in anything that isn’t made of either matter or energy ...