Richard Baron tries to be good in government. This article considers some of the ethical questions that arise in the conduct of government, in the light of two leading approaches to ethics. The two ...

Academician Abdusalam A. Guseinov on pacificism and the perspective of the infinite beginning. The idea of nonviolence entered into the cycle of Russian ethics on the wave of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ...

Have you ever wondered whether everyone talks about you behind your back? Whether they are all keeping something from you? John McGuire discusses the Cartesian nightmare that is The Truman Show. Every ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Noson Yanofsky tells us how to deal with contradictions and the limitations of reason that arise from them. We all have conflicting desires. We want to get promoted, but don’t want to work too hard.

Stephen Anderson asks what we mean when we ask if existence has a meaning. In their 1983 film The Meaning of Life, Monty Python took their departing shot at the movie-going public, and simultaneously ...

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 ...

Ben G. Yacobi asks if it is possible to live authentically. We are told: “To thine own self be true!” But what do we mean if we say that somebody is an authentic person, or a very genuine person?

Mark Conard reveals the metaphysical truths lurking under the rug in Tarantino’s cult classic. Nihilism is a term which describes the loss of value and meaning in people’s lives. When Nietzsche ...

After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists. Philosophers who aspire to describe reality without resort to myth, too often remain in thrall to the myth of ...