Bertrand Russell argued that the time spent working by an average person should be drastically reduced, work being an overrated virtue. Paul Western believes that ‘idleness’ is still not valued highly ...

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 ...

William Grey launches an all-out attack on the paranormal armed with a couple of razors honed with the whetstone of scepticism. ‘Philosophy’ is a word taken from Greek, and literally means ‘love of ...

Marina Gerner on a thought experiment about consciousness. Imagine a girl called Mary. She is a brilliant neuroscientist and a world expert on colour vision. But because she grew up entirely in a ...

James Sirois gives us a strong warning about overusing the net. The internet has become so all-pervading that even the word seems a little old-fashioned now. No-one really uses it much anymore. We ask ...

Peter Flegel highlights possible connections between early Greek philosophy and the ideas of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. Just over a year ago an eager team of archaeologists scoured through the ...

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes. One night in long bygone times, man ...

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the many entrants not included. Although Heidegger described this as the fundamental question of metaphysics, the answer is quite straightforward at its ...

The following responses to this basic ethical question each win a random book. To understand how acquire have moral knowledge, we first need to understand what sort of thing we are talking about when ...

Stephen Faison cross-examines the idea of a social contract. According to classic social contract theory, originally elaborated by Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century, human beings begin ...

What is art? Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 book Critique of Judgement, asked why we judge certain things to be beautiful and if we can apply this judgement to the appreciation of art. This indicates the ...