John R. Lenz tells us why Russell thought philosophy worthwhile. Bertrand Russell did a disservice to philosophy by defining the word. Early in his career he defined philosophy as the logical-analytic ...

Plato translation unveiled • Prison TV drama takes philosophical turn • UNESCO creates ethics code for neurotech — News reports by Anja Steinbauer, Olivia Gill and Martin Cohen Translating from ...

Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity is to avoid catastrophe. For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we ...

The following answers to this fundamental question each win a random book. Life is the aspect of existence that processes, acts, reacts, evaluates, and evolves through growth (reproduction and ...

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French ...

Peter Hacker is the leading Wittgenstein scholar at Oxford. Li Hong asked him about Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy. In your book Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, ...

Angels, humans, the leaves on a tree; is each one unique or just an example of its kind? Peter Pesic explains why Leibniz thought even leaves are individuals. In the long debate on these issues, ...

Some say that one of the main differences between science and philosophy is that science makes progress while philosophers go round in circles endlessly discussing the same questions. Toni Vogel Carey ...

Alejandra Mancilla uses an example from Robert Nozick to question the claims to ownership made by breeders of genetically modified organisms. John Locke’s justification of property rights started with ...

Tim Wilkinson tries to chart our quest for consistency without contradicting himself. Consistency doesn’t guarantee truth, but as ancient Indian and Greek philosophers realised, it helps. Socrates, ...

Robert J. Sawyer is one of the best known sci-fi authors of today. Nick DiChario talks to him about the philosophical ideas embedded in his books. Robert J. Sawyer is one of the most popular and ...

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 ...