Tim Wilkinson on the physics & philosophy of parallel universes. In his 1895 essay Is Life Worth Living? the American philosopher William James wrote, “Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Marshall McLuhan never owned a mobile phone. He died in 1980, before such gadgets became widely available. Yet the theories he developed about the effect of communications media on the human psyche ...

The story of Russell’s philosophical account of the evils of German politics starts with the chaotic jingoism of the First World War. Prior to 1914, German scholarship had been widely respected in ...

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 ...

Jim Moran explains why saving the planet will be an uphill struggle. The recent development of the branch of philosophy called ‘environmental philosophy’, or as it is sometimes referred to, ...

Stuart Greenstreet explains how analytical philosophy got into a mess. This year’s centenary of the First World War coincides with Ludwig Wittgenstein beginning writing his Tractatus ...

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 ...

Philippa Foot has for decades been one of Oxford’s best-known and most original ethicists. Her groundbreaking papers won her worldwide recognition but at the dawn of the new century she has finally ...

Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher. Etienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the English-speaking world through a footnote in his friend Michel de ...