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 ...

Robert Griffiths argues that humanist ethics has significant limitations. There are many people who do not believe in gods in any sense. Some are fervent atheists, but there are also very uninterested ...

Ben Trubody finds that philosophy-phobic physicist Feynman is an unacknowledged philosopher of science. Richard Feynman (1918-88) was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth 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 ...

Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics. The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama is still best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last ...

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 ...

Duane Cady tells us why pacifism isn’t sitting back and letting the masters of war have their way. Pacifism rarely gets taken seriously due to a widespread cultural bias: ‘everybody knows’ that ...

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included. One of the most fundamental questions of anthropology is that of personhood. We might also consider it the starting point for ...

Welcome to the 4th Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. I’m delighted to say that we’re giving this year’s award to Professor Noam Chomsky. Stupidity comes in many ...

Ralph Blumenau on why things may not be what they seem to be. Before Kant, philosophers had divided propositions into two kinds, under the technical names of ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’. Propositions ...

Scott Remer thinks we arendt happy without a community and considers the complete reconstruction of the modern world to be well worth weil. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah ...