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 ...

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 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 ...

Anja Steinbauer introduces the life and ideas of Immanuel Kant, the merry sage of Königsberg, who died 200 years ago. “Have the courage to use your own reason!”, (in Latin sapere aude!) is the battle ...

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 ...

In his Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), Hegel argues that there are three ways of doing history. The first of these is original history. Original history refers to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Jeff Mason on Kierkegaard’s three forms of life: the ethical, the aesthetic and the religious. Why get up in the morning? Should we get up for ourselves, for others, or for the Christian God? If we ...

Gary Cox is the author of several books on existentialism and general philosophy. The 10th anniversary edition of his bestselling self-help book How to Be an Existentialist was published recently.

Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher. Etienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the English-speaking world through a footnote in his friend Michel de ...

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 ...