Philosophy

Are coincidences real?

I am an unequivocal rationalist and yet I still want to see something strange and wonderful in life’s weird coincidences

Paul Broks

Bertrand Russell wanted to kill off causation. Can contemporary philosophy rescue it?

8 minutes

We are interwoven beings

A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning?

Mercedes Valmisa

Bernard Williams on Descartes’s audacious endeavour to prove knowledge is possible

43 minutes

This essay isn’t true

Alethic nihilism is the theory that nothing is true. There is much to gain by taking this radical idea seriously

David Liggins

The lethal act

The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists?

Martin Kovan

Is the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ even worth asking?

9 minutes

Is it more likely you’re a person with a past, or an ephemeral brain in a void?

6 minutes

Why read Fichte today?

Inspired by Kant, Fichte launched a radical philosophical system based on subjectivity and aspiring to freedom for all

Gabriel Gottlieb

Metaphysics and beyond – Martha Nussbaum on Aristotle’s indelible ideas

43 minutes

Knowing if you’re awake seems simple. Why has it vexed philosophers for centuries?

5 minutes

To see the Universe more clearly, think in terms of processes, not objects

6 minutes

Embodied cognition seems intuitive, but philosophy can push it to some strange places

14 minutes

Hegel today

Too dense, too abstract, too suspect, Hegel was outside the Anglophone canon for a century. Why is his star rising again?

Willem deVries

What can a Kurosawa classic tell us about reality, knowledge and truth?

5 minutes

The mind does not exist

The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them

Joe Gough

Ideas that work

Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins

Matthieu Queloz

On the necessity of obedience

George Berkeley was a visionary immaterialist. And a philosopher whose views on subordination to God legitimised slavery

Tom Jones

Reincarnation now

Modern mindfulness strips Buddhism of its spiritual core. We need an ethics of reincarnation for an interconnected world

Avram Alpert

The problem of now

The injunction to immerse yourself in the present might be psychologically potent, but is it metaphysically meaningful?

John Martin Fischer

Can you know everything about colour if you see in black and white? A thought experiment

5 minutes