Yahia Lababidi meditates on the aesthetics and ethics of two great contrarians. The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive ...

Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence. In philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is less often ...

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Van Harvey reflects on Huxley’s and Clifford’s reasons for not believing. In the struggle against obscurantism and the appeal to blind faith that was rampant in Victorian culture, it would be ...

Huong Nguyen considers current trends in democratic thinking. Someone made a provocative and skeptical comment on democracy to me: “‘Democracy’ is a meaningless term. Communists have referred to their ...

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 ...

Roy Turner thinks about being good. Kwame Anthony Appiah opens his Experiments In Ethics with the engaging claim that “this little book is an attempt to relate the business of philosophical ethics to… ...

Richard Garner says it’s about time we got rid of it. Free thinkers and skeptics throughout history have entertained the suspicion that morality is a mistake, a scam, a fiction that we make up; but ...

The first example Gettier comes up with has to do with Jones and Smith applying for a job. If Smith had strong evidence that Jones will get the job (for example if the boss said Jones will get the job ...

Do Natural Rights exist? Michael Birshan investigates one of the more persistent political assertions of the modern world in this prize-winning essay. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ...

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Paul Edwards disagrees with Kant in this recently-discovered paper. All Enlightenment thinkers who wrote on the subject – Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau among others – agreed that the religious ...