Andy Owen explains what Aristotle was tolkien about. “Without friends no one would want to live, even if they had all other worldly things.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII In my early ...

Massimo Pigliucci takes the philosophy pill. Is there a cure for life? This question may seem rather bizarre, as we don’t normally think of life as a disease. And yet, a moment’s reflection reminds us ...

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought. Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which ...

Stephen Anderson sternly judges a cause célèbre. There was a time – some years ago – when to profess disbelief in a Supreme Being could be hazardous to one’s health. You could get hacked to pieces ...

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 ...

Colin Harper investigates the case of Ernst Bloch. In Philosophy Now No.3 Peter Rickman compared the activity of a philosopher to that of a spy. Whilst I completely agree with his comments on the ...

Ed Fraser argues that the theory of recollection presented by Socrates in the Meno is circular. The primary objective of Plato’s Meno is an inquiry into the nature of virtue. Accordingly, Socrates, ...

Susan Lucas on how words gain meaning from their context. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most startlingly original pieces of philosophy ever written. It has been ...

The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis has a very philosophical nature to it. It can be considered a form of Platonism, the philosophy of Plato, who argued that certain abstract ideas have a real ...

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 ...

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 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 ...